Millions of people awoke on October 20, 2025, to find the internet’s backbone unexpectedly fractured. A sweeping outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS)—the world’s largest cloud computing provider—sent shockwaves across the globe, disrupting everything from social media and gaming to banking and airline operations. The incident, which began in the early hours of the morning and lasted several hours, underscored just how deeply the modern world relies on the invisible plumbing of cloud infrastructure.
The trouble began around 1:26 a.m. Eastern Time, when AWS’s Health Dashboard reported “significant error rates for requests” in its US-EAST-1 Region, a major data hub located in Virginia, United States. According to CNN, the outage’s impact was immediate and far-reaching. Users across the United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Australia, France, and Japan found themselves unable to access apps, websites, and smart devices they’d come to depend on daily. Downdetector, a service that tracks internet disruptions, logged an astonishing 6.5 million reports worldwide within hours—over 1.4 million from the United States alone, and 800,000 from the UK.
The list of affected services read like a who’s who of the digital economy. Social media giants like Snapchat and Facebook, gaming platforms such as Roblox and Fortnite, and messaging apps including Signal all went dark for millions. Even Amazon’s own products—Ring doorbell cameras, Alexa-powered smart speakers, Prime Video, and the company’s flagship shopping website—were not immune. According to The Associated Press, users reported being unable to access Amazon’s website or download books to their Kindle devices.
Financial and travel sectors weren’t spared either. Major UK banks, including Halifax, Lloyds, and Bank of Scotland, acknowledged that customers couldn’t log in to their accounts or process transactions, as reported by Bank of Scotland’s official X account. Meanwhile, US airlines Delta and United faced disruptions to booking systems and internal operations, with United stating, “United implemented back-up systems to end the technology disruption and our teams are working to get our customers on their way.” Delta noted minor flight delays but expected no lasting impact.
The outage even rippled through the world of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. Coinbase, the popular crypto exchange, assured users that “All funds are safe,” while AI startup Perplexity’s CEO, Aravind Srinivas, posted, “Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.” Canva, the online design platform, and Zoom, the video conferencing staple, also reported temporary service disruptions.
So, what exactly went wrong? Amazon traced the problem to its Domain Name System (DNS)—the internet’s equivalent of a phone book, translating web addresses into IP addresses computers can understand. The glitch prevented thousands of companies’ applications from finding the data they needed, particularly data stored in Amazon’s DynamoDB database service. As Mike Chapple of the University of Notre Dame explained to CNN, “Amazon had the data safely stored, but nobody else could find it for several hours, leaving apps temporarily separated from their data. It’s as if large portions of the internet suffered temporary amnesia.”
Amazon moved quickly to communicate with customers. By just after 2 a.m. ET, AWS said it believed it had identified the root cause and was “working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.” The company recommended that users flush their DNS caches to help restore access. By around 6 a.m. ET, most AWS service operations were succeeding normally, and by 6:30 a.m., the company confirmed that “global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered.” Some requests were still being throttled as the company worked through a backlog, but the worst had passed.
Despite the scale of the disruption, cybersecurity experts were quick to rule out foul play. “There’s no sign that this was a cyberattack,” said Rob Jardin, chief digital officer at NymVPN, according to CNN. Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, echoed that sentiment, calling it “a good old-fashioned technology issue,” and noting that “these kinds of issues are usually relatively fast to resolve.”
Yet the outage prompted serious reflection on the world’s growing dependence on a handful of cloud providers. AWS, which accounted for 37% of the global cloud market share in 2024 and generated over $107 billion in revenue, supports a dizzying array of organizations—from the US Army and Disney to United Airlines and the NFL. “So much of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) compute companies who provide the underlying infrastructure that when there’s an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad range, a broad spectrum of online services,” Burgess told The Associated Press.
Professor Feng Li of Bayes Business School at City St George’s University in London described the outage as “a timely reminder of how deeply our economies now depend on just a handful of cloud infrastructures.” He warned, “Complex distributed systems operate at enormous scale and inevitably carry systemic risk. What stands out here though is the breadth of impact—from consumer apps to financial and public sector services—suggesting many organizations still underestimate the level of concentration risk in today’s digital infrastructure.”
IT security experts like Marek Szustak at eSky Group pointed out that companies should design systems to withstand regional failures, advocating for geographical distribution and robust emergency planning. “Testing of emergency scenarios should be the norm, not a luxury,” Szustak advised, as quoted by CNN.
For everyday users, the outage was a stark reminder of the fragility underlying the convenience of modern technology. Lance Ulanoff, editor at TechRadar, summed it up on CNN: “AWS sits in the middle of everything.” The outage showed that when a single cloud provider falters, the effects can cascade instantly across the digital landscape. While Amazon’s rapid response and established processes kept the disruption to hours rather than days, the event has reignited debate about the risks of putting so many eggs in so few baskets.
As the dust settles, AWS customers and millions of users worldwide are left to ponder a simple but pressing question: What happens next time the cloud goes dark?
