Amazon’s AWS outage has knocked companies like Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo and extra offline

On this crisp October morning, it seems like half of the web is coping with a hangover. A extreme Amazon Internet Companies outage took out many, many web sites, apps, video games and different companies that depend on Amazon’s cloud division to remain up and working. That features a lengthy record of fashionable software program like Venmo, Snapchat, Canva and Fortnite. Even Amazon’s personal assistant Alexa has been stuttering, and if you happen to’re questioning why the web appears to be towards you in the present day — you are not imagining it.

There may be some excellent news now although. At about 4:30PM ET in the present day (October 20), issues appear to be returning again to regular. Apps like Venmo and Lyft, which had been both gradual to reply or fully nonresponsive earlier than, are showing to behave easily.

As of 1:15PM ET although, a number of companies had been unavailable, together with asking Alexa for the climate or to show off lights in your house. The Lyft app was additionally slower to reply than regular, and Venmo transactions weren’t finishing.

In keeping with the AWS service health page, Amazon was trying into “elevated error charges and latencies for a number of AWS companies” within the US-EAST-1 area (i.e. knowledge facilities in Northern Virginia) as of three:11AM ET on Monday. By 5:01AM, AWS had discovered {that a} DNS decision problem with its DynamoDB API was the reason for the outage. DynamoDB is a database that holds information for AWS shoppers.

At about 12:08PM ET, the corporate posted a small statement that reiterated the above and added that the “underlying DNS problem was totally mitigated at 2:24 AM PDT.” In keeping with the discover, some Amazon “clients nonetheless proceed to expertise elevated error charges with AWS companies within the N. Virginia (us-east-1) Area attributable to points with launching new EC2 situations.” Amazon additionally stated Amazon.com and Amazon subsidiaries, in addition to AWS customer support assist operations have been impacted.

“Amazon had the information safely saved, however no one else may discover it for a number of hours, leaving apps quickly separated from their knowledge,” Mike Chapple, a instructing professor of IT, analytics and operations at College of Notre Dame, informed CNN. “It’s as if giant parts of the web suffered non permanent amnesia.”

As of 6:35AM, AWS stated it had totally mitigated the DNS problem and that “most AWS Service operations are succeeding usually now.” Nonetheless, the knock-on impact triggered points with different AWS companies, together with EC2, a digital machine service on which many corporations construct on-line functions.

At 8:48AM, AWS stated it was “making progress on resolving the difficulty with new EC2 occasion launches within the US-EAST-1 Area.” It beneficial that shoppers not tie new deployments to particular Availability Zones (i.e. a number of knowledge facilities in a given area) “in order that EC2 has flexibility” in choosing a zone that could be a greater choice.

At 9:42AM, Amazon famous on the standing web page that though it had utilized “a number of mitigations” throughout a number of Availability Zones in US-EAST-1, it was “nonetheless experiencing elevated errors for brand new EC2 occasion launches.” As such, AWS was “fee limiting new occasion launches to assist restoration.” The corporate added at 10:14AM that it was seeing “important API errors and connectivity points throughout a number of companies within the US-EAST-1 Area.” Even as soon as all the problems are resolved, AWS could have a big backlog of requests and different components to course of, so it’s going to take a while for all the things to get better.

Many, many, many corporations use US-EAST-1 for his or her AWS deployments, which is why it felt like half of the web was knocked offline on Monday morning. As of mid-morning, tons of internet sites and different companies had been sluggish or providing up error messages. Outage studies for a broad swathe of companies spiked on Down Detector. Together with Amazon’s personal companies, customers reported points with the likes of banks, airways, Disney+, Snapchat, Reddit, Lyft, Apple Music, Pinterest, Fortnite, Roblox and The New York Occasions — sorry to anybody whose Wordle streaks could also be in danger.

Websites like Reddit have posted their own status updates, and although they do not explicitly point out AWS, it is doable that the companies’ paths might cross someplace within the pipelines.

AWS gives numerous helpful options to shoppers, akin to the power for web sites and apps to routinely scale compute and server capability up and down as wanted to deal with ebbs and flows in site visitors. It additionally has knowledge facilities around the globe. That sort of infrastructure is enticing to corporations that serve a worldwide viewers and wish to remain on-line across the clock. As of mid-2025, it was estimated that AWS’ share of the worldwide cloud infrastructure market was 30 %. However incidents akin to this spotlight that counting on just some suppliers to be the spine of a lot of the web is a little bit of an issue.

Replace, Oct 20 2025, 10:57AM ET: This story has been up to date to incorporate a brief record of companies affected within the intro.

Replace, Oct 20 2025, 11:17AM ET: This story has been up to date to incorporate a reference to Reddit’s personal standing replace web site.

Replace, Oct 20 2025, 1:15PM ET: This story has been up to date to incorporate a paragraph reflecting the standing of fashionable companies like Lyft, Venmo and Alexa, based mostly on our editors’ private experiences as of this time.

Replace, Oct 20 2025, 3:15PM ET: This story has been up to date to incorporate a brief assertion from Amazon describing a timeline of occasions, when the underlying problem was mitigated and what elements of Amazon have been impacted.

Replace, Oct 20 2025, 4:30PM ET: This story has been up to date to mirror the standing of companies like Venmo and Lyft as of Monday afternoon.