Major AWS Outage Disrupts Global Services on October 20, 2025
Updated: October 20, 2025, 5:12 PM EDT
Amazon Web Services experienced a widespread technical outage beginning around midnight Pacific Time on October 20, 2025, causing service disruptions for thousands of businesses and millions of consumers worldwide.
What Happened
The outage impacted major consumer applications including Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo, Robinhood, Duolingo, Signal, and Coinbase. Even Amazon’s own retail platforms experienced significant disruptions, with users reporting delays in deliveries and image upload failures.
The impact extended far beyond U.S. borders. In Italy, critical public services including the Agenzia delle Entrate (Revenue Agency) and banking giant Intesa Sanpaolo went offline. The United Kingdom similarly experienced widespread disruptions to online banking platforms and government portals.
Technical Analysis
AWS engineers identified the root cause as DNS and network-related failures specifically affecting Amazon DynamoDB and EC2 services within the US-EAST-1 region—one of Amazon’s largest and most critical data center zones. These initial failures triggered cascading disruptions across dependent applications and APIs, demonstrating the interconnected vulnerability of cloud-dependent infrastructure.
Recovery Efforts
By midday Pacific Time, AWS began implementing mitigation measures and reported gradual restoration of impacted services. However, as of late afternoon, some residual issues—particularly affecting AWS Lambda serverless computing services—remained under active remediation.
User Impact: Real-World Consequences
Social media activity revealed the breadth of the disruption’s impact on everyday users:
- Financial services: Users on investment platforms like M1 Finance reported delayed trades and unresponsive applications during critical market hours
- E-commerce: Amazon shoppers encountered “unknown delayed” statuses on orders and were unable to track deliveries
- Gaming: Players across multiple platforms reported connectivity issues and missing in-game rewards
- Media and communications: Users experienced failures uploading images and accessing messaging services
Cyberattack Rumors Debunked
Despite widespread speculation on social media—including unsubstantiated claims linking the outage to Chinese cyberattacks—both AWS officials and independent cybersecurity experts have confirmed the incident resulted from internal technical system failures, not external malicious activity.
No evidence of data breaches, unauthorized access, or geopolitical interference has been identified. The event underscores the fragility of centralized cloud infrastructure rather than cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
What This Means
This incident highlights the critical dependency of modern digital services on a small number of cloud infrastructure providers. When a single region of a major provider like AWS experiences failures, the ripple effects can impact essential services across multiple countries and sectors—from banking to gaming to government operations.
As cloud adoption continues to grow, questions about infrastructure resilience, geographic redundancy, and disaster recovery planning have moved from technical considerations to matters of public interest and economic security.
Sources: AWS Service Health Dashboard, user reports from affected platforms, cybersecurity analysis. This report was compiled from multiple verified sources and real-time user reports as of October 20, 2025, 5:12 PM EDT.