In the early hours of October 20, 2025, the world woke up to a digital headache: Amazon Web Services (AWS), the backbone of much of the modern internet, suffered a massive outage that rippled across continents and industries. From social media to banking, gaming to government services, the disruption exposed just how dependent daily life has become on a handful of cloud providers—and just how vulnerable that dependence can make us.
According to BBC and numerous tech outlets, the outage began at 3:11 a.m. Eastern Time (12:11 a.m. Pacific), hitting AWS’s US-EAST-1 region, a hub that supports countless online services. The problem was first identified as a domain name system (DNS) malfunction—a kind of digital phonebook error that left websites and apps unable to find their way to the right servers. But as AWS engineers worked to resolve the DNS issue, they discovered a deeper problem in an internal subsystem, compounding the chaos.
By the time Amazon publicly acknowledged the trouble, the impact was already widespread. Downdetector, a site that tracks online outages, registered over 11 million user reports and more than 2,500 companies affected at the peak, with some outlets citing figures as high as 6.5 million global reports. The list of disrupted services read like a who’s who of the digital economy: Snapchat, Venmo, Reddit, Canvas, Robinhood, Zoom, Shopify, Ring, Pokémon GO, Fortnite, and even Amazon’s own Alexa and Kindle services. Canvas, a key educational platform, saw over 5,000 complaints in 24 hours, while payment apps like Venmo and Robinhood left users unable to access their funds or execute trades.
Major airlines weren’t spared either. Southwest, United, and Delta all reported issues dispatching flights or providing digital services to customers, leading to delays and confusion. Amtrak, the nation’s railroad operator, warned travelers of “intermittent technical difficulties” that hobbled notifications and booking systems. Even the fast-food industry felt the pinch, with apps like McDonald's and Starbucks going dark for hours.
For many, the outage was more than an inconvenience—it was a wake-up call. As Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at the UK’s BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, put it to BBC, “So much of the world now relies on these three or four big compute companies who provide the underlying infrastructure that when there's an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad spectrum of online services.” Burgess likened the internet to a utility, as essential as water or electricity, but one with hidden vulnerabilities. “When something goes wrong, it’s very difficult for users to pinpoint what is happening because we don’t see Amazon, we just see Snapchat or Roblox,” he explained.
As AWS’s engineers raced to deploy fixes, the restoration process proved anything but smooth. According to live updates from Tom’s Guide and the AWS Health Dashboard, the company began applying mitigations around 5:01 a.m. ET, with partial recovery observed by 5:27 a.m. Yet, intermittent outages and a “game of whack-a-mole” ensued throughout the day. Services would flicker back to life, only to falter again as underlying issues persisted. By 1:30 p.m., thousands of Venmo users were still locked out, while Reddit, Ring, Chime, and others reported fresh spikes in outage complaints.
Some companies took to social media to reassure users. Canvas, for example, posted: “We recognize the integral role Canvas plays in the daily lives of educators and students, serving as a central hub for teaching and learning, and we know today’s AWS outage had a significant impact on that experience.” The instructional platform worked closely with AWS to restore services, finally reporting full functionality around 7 p.m. ET.
For small businesses, the outage was especially painful. Shopify, ShipStation, and Finale Inventory—tools that power online storefronts and logistics—went offline, leaving merchants unable to fulfill orders or manage shipments. “This AWS outage is very much hurting small businesses too,” one affected user told Tom’s Guide.
Financial analysts and industry insiders quickly tallied the costs. According to data cited by Tom’s Guide, the outage was estimated to be costing Amazon over $72 million per hour, with other companies like Snapchat, Zoom, and Roblox losing hundreds of thousands each hour the disruption dragged on. The broader lesson, as Monica Eaton, CEO of Chargebacks911, pointed out, is that “when AWS sneezes, half the internet catches the flu. Outages like this cause frustrated users, but also trigger a domino effect across payment flows—failed authorizations, duplicate charges, broken confirmation pages, all of that fuels a wave of disputes that merchants will be cleaning up for weeks.”
By late afternoon, Amazon reported “significant signs of recovery” and began reducing throttling on services like EC2 instance launches and Lambda event processing. At 6 p.m. ET, AWS declared the incident resolved, though it cautioned that some services—such as AWS Config, Redshift, and Connect—still faced backlogs as they processed delayed requests. The company promised a detailed post-event summary to follow, but for most users, normalcy was slowly returning.
Yet, the incident has reignited debate about the concentration of cloud infrastructure. As Christian Espinosa of Blue Goat Cyber told Tom’s Guide, “Cloud concentration, where a handful of providers host most of our critical systems, creates a single point of failure. When one data region or provider goes down, ripple effects hit everything from retail and finance to logistics and communications.” The UK, for example, saw government websites and online banking disrupted, raising concerns about the resilience of digital public services.
Looking back, the AWS outage of October 2025 was the largest internet service disruption since the CrowdStrike malfunction in 2024, which had also paralyzed flights and government systems. Each incident underscores the fragility of our digital infrastructure—and the urgent need for better contingency planning. As Jason England, Managing Editor at Tom’s Guide, mused, “How many more AWS outages until the internet builds a real backup plan?”
For now, the digital world is back online, but the questions—and the stakes—are bigger than ever. The outage may be over, but the conversation about the future of cloud computing and the risks of digital centralization is just heating up.
