A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on the morning of Oct. 20 disrupted a broad cross-section of the internet, underscoring how much global ecommerce and digital infrastructure depends on a handful of cloud providers.
The disruption affected social media platforms, gaming networks, online retailers and more before service was restored within hours.
The outage began around 3:11 a.m. Eastern Time in AWS’s US-East-1 region, based in Northern Virginia — a core hub for many of the company’s most widely used cloud services. AWS reported “increased error rates and latencies for multiple services.” It said engineers were “working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery,” according to updates posted to its public status dashboard.
AWS outage on Oct. 20
By mid-morning, AWS said it was seeing “significant signs of recovery” and that “most requests should now be succeeding.” Still, it warned that users could experience lingering latency and delayed responses as systems cleared backlogs. External monitoring site Downdetector logged more than 6.5 million reports of outages across the United States, Europe and Asia.
The fallout rippled quickly. Popular apps including Snapchat, Fortnite, and Duolingo were temporarily inaccessible. Several financial and government platforms also reported slowdowns. While AWS has not yet confirmed the precise cause, outside analysts said the disruption appeared linked to its DynamoDB database service and DNS (domain name system) resolution problems — two core components that route and process internet traffic across AWS’s network.
AWS said it will release a “Public Post-Event Summary” detailing the root cause, scope, and corrective actions once its internal investigation concludes. “We have identified the source of the issue and implemented mitigation measures,” the company said in a statement. “Our teams continue to monitor recovery and ensure system stability.”
The incident renewed debate over cloud concentration and systemic digital risk. AWS commands about 37% of the global cloud-infrastructure market, according to research firm Gartner, which is far ahead of Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. The division generated US $107.6 billion in revenue in 2024, operates across 38 geographic regions, and runs on more than 6 million kilometers of fiber-optic cabling. Its customer list includes Disney, Capital One, the U.S. Army, United Airlines, and the National Football League.
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