In the early hours of October 20, 2025, a massive internet outage swept across the globe, sending ripples through digital infrastructure and disrupting the online routines of millions. The culprit? Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing behemoth that underpins much of the modern internet, experienced a critical failure that left countless websites, apps, and essential services offline for hours.
According to ABC News, the outage began with “increased error rates and latencies” across multiple AWS services, particularly in the US-EAST-1 region, a hub in Virginia that has now become infamous for repeated disruptions. By the time the dust settled, the outage had lasted roughly 15 hours, with AWS announcing at 6:01 p.m. ET that “all AWS services returned to normal operations,” though some users continued to experience issues into the following morning as backlogs were processed and systems slowly returned to full speed.
The impact was immediate and far-reaching. DownDetector, a site that tracks real-time outage reports, lit up with complaints from users unable to access everything from Venmo and Microsoft Outlook to Zoom, Snapchat, Lyft, and even Amazon’s own Alexa and Ring devices. Gaming giants like Fortnite, Roblox, and Clash of Clans saw players locked out, while social media platforms including Facebook and Reddit experienced sharp spikes in connectivity problems. According to The Independent, “the scale of today’s outage has prompted a somewhat familiar question: do we rely on a few small companies too much?”
But the disruption wasn’t limited to entertainment and communication. In the U.S., Delta Air Lines and United Airlines reported significant issues, with customers unable to check in for flights or view seat assignments. Over in the United Kingdom, major banks such as Lloyds, Bank of Scotland, and Halifax left customers unable to log into their accounts, while the government’s tax and customs service, HMRC, and the official Gov.uk website were also affected. “We are aware of an incident affecting Amazon Web Services, and several online services which rely on their infrastructure,” a U.K. government spokesperson told TIME, emphasizing the breadth of the crisis.
Even some of the more unexpected corners of the internet felt the sting. The CEO of Eight Sleep, a company specializing in internet-connected mattresses, reported that beds were heating up unexpectedly—an odd, almost comical side effect of AWS’s woes. “The company is working to build an ‘outage mode’ to fix the fact that it can’t work when the internet isn’t working properly,” he explained, highlighting how deeply modern life is intertwined with cloud infrastructure.
So what went wrong? AWS engineers traced the root cause to an “underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers.” More specifically, significant errors at the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 region led to widespread DNS (Domain Name System) resolution failures. DNS, often described as the ‘phone book’ of the internet, translates website names into IP addresses that computers can understand. When DNS falters, so too does the ability for users to reach their favorite sites and services. As Graeme Bragg, a computer networking expert at the University of Southampton, told The Independent, “This is a significant outage because of how many companies rely on Amazon and the global scale of the impact.”
The outage’s cascading effects were exacerbated by the very tools tech teams rely on to communicate during crises. Jon Crowcroft, Marconi Professor of Communications Systems at the University of Cambridge, pointed out, “One interesting challenge is that the back channels a lot of tech people use to communicate information/tech details about ongoing outages are also taken down by this outage – hence our usual ways of learning (e.g. via Signal or Slack) are both currently stymied by the AWS outage.” It’s a bit of a paradox: the tools designed to help fix the internet are themselves dependent on the same infrastructure that failed.
As AWS worked to recover, it temporarily throttled some operations—such as launching new EC2 instances—to facilitate a full system restoration. While the underlying technical issue was resolved, the backlog of requests and the time needed for changes to propagate across the internet meant that, as Bragg noted, “it is likely that we will see some disruption for the rest of the day.” Indeed, some users found themselves unable to access services well into October 21.
For many, the outage was a wake-up call. AWS controls about 30% of the global cloud computing market, with Microsoft Cloud and Google Cloud accounting for 20% and 12% respectively, according to Synergy Research Group data cited by ABC News. This concentration means that when one giant stumbles, the effects are felt everywhere. “This outage is a big wake-up call for the fact that we have a few major big tech cloud providers that are undergirding a lot of our critical infrastructure,” said Timothy Edgar, a computer science professor at Brown University and former national security official. “That has created a real potential vulnerability for us.”
Yet, not everyone agrees that the size of AWS is the problem. Saurabh Vishnubhakat, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law, argued to ABC News that “the notion that it’s Amazon’s size in particular or their market dominance in particular that’s what’s to blame here – that’s off base.” In fact, he contends, “the fail-safes, particularly at data centers, that companies create and put in place are actually easier for the bigger companies to establish.” A world dominated by smaller, less-resourced providers could see more frequent, if less severe, outages.
Still, the pattern is hard to ignore. This was the third major AWS outage in the Virginia data center in five years, as reported by TIME. Each time, the world is reminded just how much it leans on a handful of companies for everything from banking and travel to gaming and even a good night’s sleep.
Qi Liao, a professor of computer science at Central Michigan University, summed up the stakes: “Amazon Web Services is the largest cloud company in the U.S. People’s lives depend on it. Not to mention that we lose billions of dollars when these services go down.” The financial cost of this latest disruption remains unknown, but previous outages have cost Fortune 500 companies billions, as seen with last year’s CrowdStrike incident.
As the world recovers from another digital hiccup, experts urge a balanced approach. “Every approach has its pros and cons,” Liao noted. “As an engineer, we’re always trying to make our system robust but it is unrealistic to expect that there’s never going to be an outage.” The real question, perhaps, is how society will adapt to a future where the cloud is both omnipresent and, at times, all too fragile.
