Millions of people across North America, Europe, and beyond faced an unexpected digital blackout on Monday, October 20, 2025, as Amazon Web Services (AWS)—the backbone of much of the modern internet—suffered a major outage that rippled through the online world. From social media apps and video calls to banking services and airline bookings, the disruption was felt everywhere, underscoring just how much day-to-day life now depends on these invisible cloud networks.
The trouble began early in the morning, with AWS’s status page first flagging issues at 3:11 a.m. Eastern Time. By 8 a.m. BST, users from London to Tokyo were already struggling to access services as varied as Snapchat, Reddit, Zoom, and Venmo, according to BBC News and Reuters. Even Amazon’s own platforms—including Amazon Music, Prime Video, Alexa, and Ring—were not spared. The outage extended to major banks like Lloyds, Bank of Scotland, and Halifax, as well as government agencies such as HM Revenue and Customs in the UK.
Downdetector, a popular outage-tracking website, received more than 4 million reports from frustrated users across the globe, covering over 500 companies. The scale was staggering: financial services, airlines (including United and Delta), telecoms giants (AT&T and Verizon), and workplace tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Asana all experienced interruptions. As Business Insider noted, even food delivery apps and gaming platforms like Roblox and Fortnite were knocked offline.
What caused this massive digital hiccup? AWS, the world’s largest cloud computing provider, traced the root of the problem to its US-EAST-1 region in Virginia—the largest hub in its sprawling global network. Initially, the company pointed to a DNS (Domain Name System) issue. DNS is often described as the phone book of the internet, translating website names into the numerical addresses that computers use to find each other. When DNS fails, it’s as if the entire internet forgets where everyone lives.
But as the day wore on, AWS provided more details. At 11:43 a.m. ET, the company said it had “narrowed down the source of the network connectivity issues that impacted AWS Services,” blaming “an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers.” In plainer terms, a crucial system that keeps internet traffic flowing smoothly had malfunctioned, causing a cascade of errors across many services.
Recovery was gradual and at times uneven. As AWS worked to resolve the problem, it warned that “some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution,” and that services like launching new EC2 instances (the company’s virtual servers) in the US-EAST-1 region were still experiencing increased error rates. By 6:35 a.m. ET, AWS said most services were “succeeding normally,” but a fresh wave of outage reports spiked later that morning, especially in the U.S.
By early afternoon, there were “early signs of recovering in a few Availability Zones (AZs) in the US-EAST-1 Region,” according to AWS updates. At 5:48 p.m. ET, about half of the affected services had been restored, and by 6:53 p.m. ET, all 142 services that were down in the morning were running again. AWS marked the issue as “resolved,” noting, “Over time we reduced throttling of operations and worked in parallel to resolve network connectivity issues until the services fully recovered. By 3:01 p.m. (PT), all AWS services returned to normal operations.”
Still, for many users and businesses, the damage was already done. The outage brought daily routines to a halt: people couldn’t pay their hairdressers, change airline tickets, or even log in to work tools. A United Airlines spokesperson told Business Insider that the company had to implement backup systems to “end the technology disruption.” Robinhood, a major financial services app, said its services were “back online and recovering.” A Snapchat spokesperson advised users to “hang tight” as the company investigated lingering issues.
For some, the disruption was a stark reminder of the fragility of the digital infrastructure that underpins so much of modern life. “Today’s outage is another reminder that the digital world doesn’t stop at borders—a local fault can ripple worldwide in minutes,” said Charlotte Wilson, head of enterprise at Check Point Software, as quoted by Business Insider. “We’ve built convenience on shared systems, but resilience still depends on people and process.”
Technology reporters from BBC News and other outlets echoed this sentiment, noting that while outages affecting individual platforms are nothing new, the increasing frequency and scale of multi-site outages raise serious questions about the resilience of the cloud. In fact, this was the third time in five years that Amazon’s Virginia data center had triggered a major internet collapse, according to Reuters.
It’s not just AWS that’s vulnerable. In July 2024, a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused computers worldwide to crash, creating chaos for airlines, hospitals, banks, and businesses. Notable outages in 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2019 have also been traced back to technical missteps at major service providers. Each incident highlights how interconnected—and, at times, brittle—the digital world has become.
Despite the disruption, some tech giants managed to stay online. Google, Meta, and X (formerly Twitter) continued to operate normally throughout the outage. Elon Musk even took to X to boast: “X still works.” T-Mobile, which appeared on Downdetector’s list of affected companies, clarified that its own network was fine; customers were simply unable to access third-party sites and apps due to AWS’s troubles.
By the end of the day, as AWS services returned to normal, the focus shifted to the aftermath. Companies began tallying up losses and investigating what went wrong. As BBC News technology correspondent Lily Jamali put it, “Now the blame game starts as companies start to try and recoup losses from today.”
Amazon, for its part, directed inquiries to its service status page and did not immediately provide further comment on why the Virginia data center remains a recurring point of failure. The company did, however, acknowledge that some services had “backlogs of events” that could take hours to clear, even after the main issue was resolved.
As the dust settles, one thing is clear: the convenience of the cloud comes with real risks. In an era where everything from grocery shopping to government services relies on a handful of tech giants, even a brief outage can have global consequences. Monday’s AWS incident was a wake-up call for companies and consumers alike—reminding us all that, sometimes, the cloud has a silver lining, but it can also cast a very long shadow.
