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By Hollie Silverman and Dan Gooding
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced an outage Monday, impacting multiple websites in the US-EAST-1 Region, according to the company's health dashboard.
Snapchat, Canva and Fortnite were just a few of the platforms experiencing issues following the outage.
AWS told Newsweek that it was working to fully restore services as soon as possible.
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Why It Matters
AWS's dominance in the market means disruptions ripple across critical sectors—banking, communications, media, and health care—affecting both consumers and major businesses. Monday’s outage also underscored the risks of heavy reliance on large-scale cloud providers for national digital infrastructure and vital internet functions, sparking fresh debate about diversification and technical resilience across the tech industry.
What Is the AWS Outage Affecting?
Issues with latencies and increased error rates started late Sunday night, the dashboard shows, with multiple mitigation tactics put in place to recover systems.
As the backbone for thousands of platforms, AWS plays a critical role in powering everything from banking apps to entertainment services. Metrics from 2024 show AWS held 37 percent of the global cloud market share, generated $107.6 billion in revenue, and operated on more than 6 million kilometers of fiber optic cabling.
AWS identified the core issue as an “operational” incident in its US-EAST-1 region located in Northern Virginia, a major hub for its cloud services and a site previously involved in past outages. Technological analysts and AWS’s own messages pointed to failures in DNS resolution and networking systems within the database infrastructure as likely contributors.
The outage affected a wide variety of platforms and services, including: social apps like Snapchat and Reddit; entertainment services like Hulu and PlayStation; finance tools such as Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, and major banks in the United States and United Kingdom.
Amazon’s own websites, Prime Video, and Alexa experienced degraded service. Users faced issues logging into popular games like Wordle and Fortnite, while business and health care systems also felt the impact.
How Long Will the Outage Last?
The AWS outage began just after 3 a.m. ET on October 20 as users globally reported widespread access issues for websites and apps across Downdetector and similar monitoring platforms.
Disruptions lasted upward of two hours for most services, though some users—mostly in the United States—continued to see problems for over six hours. AWS announced at 5:27 a.m. ET that core issues had been resolved and most services were recovering, but intermittent disruptions persisted into the morning.
What People Are Saying
AWS, on its website Monday: "We have taken additional mitigation steps to aid the recovery of the underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers and are now seeing connectivity and API recovery for AWS services. We have also identified and are applying next steps to mitigate throttling of new EC2 instance launches. We will provide an update by 10:00 AM PDT."
Junade Ali, a software engineer and cybersecurity expert, told Reuters: “It appears to be related to one of AWS’s networking systems for a database product and should be resolved unless further issues arise.”
NymVPN CEO Harry Halpin told The New York Times: “This shows the risk of national infrastructures leaning on a few providers.”
Charlotte Wilson of Checkpoint Software Technologies told the BBC: “Periods of disruption can increase the likelihood of scam attacks and underscore the importance of data backup.”
Elon Musk said on X on October 20: “X stayed up while AWS went down.”
What Happens Next
AWS continues to monitor service health and will provide ongoing updates as it resolves remaining delays and operational backlogs.
Update 10/20/25, 12:53 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.
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