Amazon Reveals Cause of Major AWS Internet Outage Earlier This Week
October 24, 2025
UPDATE 10/24: Amazon has shared a detailed breakdown of the events that led to a major outage affecting over 2,000 services on Monday, Oct. 20, resulting in over 16 million reports from individual customers struggling to access services in 60 countries.
Amazon says the issue occurred at its largest cluster of data centers, US-East-1. It was “triggered by a latent defect” in the brand’s DynamoDB Domain Name System (DNS), which meant it was no longer able to share the necessary information to connect customers to services that used Amazon Web Services (AWS).
A DNS system works like a phone book for the internet, connecting website names to IP addresses and allowing information to be shared between services and customers. The original bug failed to automatically repair itself, which then led to cascading issues with other parts of the widespread AWS platform.
Amazon apologized to customers for the outage and pledged to “do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to improve our availability even further.
“While we have a strong track record of operating our services with the highest levels of availability, we know how critical our services are to our customers, their applications and end users, and their businesses,” it added. “We know this event impacted many customers in significant ways.”
UPDATE 10/21: Amazon says all AWS services “returned to normal operations” as of 3:01 p.m. PT on Monday. It reiterated that the outage was caused by “DNS resolution issues,” and promised to share “a detailed AWS post-event summary.”
Analysts estimate the total cost of the outage could tip into the billions. On X, many noted that the event highlights the dangers of having so many top internet-based companies rely on a single cloud provider.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) took it a step further to once again push for major tech companies to be broken up. “If a company can break the entire internet, they are too big. Period. It’s time to break up Big Tech,” she tweeted.
UPDATE 4: As of 12:30 p.m. ET, total global Downdetector reports have topped 9.8 million, including 2.7 million+ in the US.
UPDATE 3: As of 10 a.m. ET, Downdetector reported 8.1 million+ global reports of connectivity issues, including 1.9 million+ in the US, 1M+ in the UK, and 418K in France. Approximately 2,000 companies reported outages, and 280 are ongoing.
UPDATE 2: An earlier version of this story said users were reporting issues with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. A spokesperson for T-Mobile told PCMag no outage or service disruption happened on its network. “Our customers had issues when trying to use other sites or services due to a third party’s outage early this morning.” It’s likely users mistakenly believed their carriers were at fault, but the services they were trying to access were experiencing the outage. AT&T and Verizon have yet to comment on the outage.
UPDATE: Amazon’s Web Services said at 6:35 a.m. ET that the outage happened due to a Domain Name System (DNS) issue. “Most” operations have now returned to normal, but Amazon warns that “some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution.”
Downdetector says it received over 6.5 million global reports of connectivity problems, including 1.4 million+ from the US and 800K+ in the UK.
“The lesson here is resilience,” says Luke Kehoe, an industry analyst at Ookla. “Many organizations still concentrate critical workloads in a single cloud region. Distributing critical apps and data across multiple regions and availability zones can materially reduce the blast radius of future incidents.”
Those incidents, he says, are probably “becoming slightly more frequent as companies are encouraged to completely rely on cloud services, [but] this kind of outage, where a foundational internet service brings down a large swathe of online services, only happens a handful of times in a year.”
Original Story:
Finding it tough to reach your favorite sites or apps today? A major internet outage is affecting many of the world’s most popular online services, restricting millions of users around the world.
Popular services like Canva, Coinbase, Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, Lyft, Reddit, Roku, Signal, Slack, Snapchat, Venmo, and more began reporting issues around 2 a.m. ET on Oct. 20.
It’s also impacting gamers with the Epic Games Store and PlayStation Network suffering from problems, alongside titles like Clash Royale, Dead by Daylight, Fortnite, Roblox, and Rocket League.
The issues appear to stem from a problem with Amazon Web Services (AWS). At 5:27 a.m. ET, it said it had found a “potential root cause” for the problem and started rolling out a fix. “We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests,” Amazon says.
Since then, some services appear to be recovering with fewer reported issues. Others have continued to be down, with outage tracking tool Downdetector showing persistent issues for services like Hulu, Roku, HBO Max, and Peloton.
Many of Amazon’s popular services have also been impacted with outages across Alexa, Amazon Music, Blink, Prime Video, and Ring smart home products. Previous AWS-related outages have seen slow but steady recoveries over several hours, so you may need patience when trying to use tools today.
(Disclosure: Downdetector owner Ookla is owned by PCMag parent company Ziff Davis.)
About Our Expert
I’ve been a journalist for over a decade after getting my start in tech reporting back in 2013. I joined PCMag in 2025, where I cover the latest developments across the tech sphere, writing about the gadgets and services you use every day. Be sure to send me any tips you think PCMag would be interested in.
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