Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major outage on October 20, 2025, due to problems with its Domain Name System (DNS), which plays a critical role in translating human-readable website names into computer-understandable IP addresses. This disruption affected many popular online platforms and services worldwide, including Snapchat, Fortnite, Amazon's own services like Alexa and Prime Video, Coinbase, Robinhood, and others. The issue started around 3 a.m. Eastern Time in several AWS data centers, particularly in the US-EAST-1 region (Northern Virginia), impacting about 64 internal AWS services and causing increased error rates and connectivity failures. The outage's root cause was traced to a malfunction in DNS entries related to one of AWS's major databases, DynamoDB, which temporarily lost the necessary address translations for certain services. This DNS failure caused widespread interruptions because many websites and apps depend on AWS infrastructure for cloud computing, storage, and functionality. AWS engineers worked actively to mitigate the problem and restore normal operations. Recovery began within a few hours, and most impacted services were back to normal by mid-morning to early afternoon on that same day. While the outage was significant, there is no indication it was caused by a cyberattack; rather, it was a technical failure within AWS's systems. This incident highlights the vulnerability of the internet ecosystem due to centralization around a few major cloud providers like AWS, whose outages can affect millions of users and thousands of businesses globally. AWS, along with competitors like Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, typically resolves such issues within hours due to their established incident management processes.
Actionable advice: During such outages, users and businesses dependent on AWS should monitor AWS's official status updates and have contingency plans, including backups or multi-cloud strategies, to mitigate service disruptions when these outages occur.
