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 Providers 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 listing of well-liked 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 as we speak — you are not imagining it.

As of 1:15PM ET as we speak (October 20), it seems the outage has not been resolved. A number of companies stay unavailable, together with asking Alexa for the climate or to show off lights in your house. Venmo additionally appears to be down nonetheless, although their apps have all displayed alerts saying they’re conscious of points plaguing their companies. The Lyft app can be slower to reply than common.

In line with the AWS service health page, Amazon was wanting into “elevated error charges and latencies for a number of AWS companies” within the US-EAST-1 area (i.e. information 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 data for AWS purchasers.

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

As of 6:35AM, AWS mentioned it had absolutely 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 firms construct on-line purposes.

At 8:48AM, AWS mentioned it was “making progress on resolving the problem with new EC2 occasion launches within the US-EAST-1 Area.” It really helpful that purchasers not tie new deployments to particular Availability Zones (i.e. a number of information facilities in a given area) “in order that EC2 has flexibility” in choosing a zone which may 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 spanking new EC2 occasion launches.” As such, AWS was “charge 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 may have a major backlog of requests and different components to course of, so it will take a while for every little thing to recuperate.

Many, many, many firms 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 Instances — 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 potential that the companies’ paths could cross someplace within the pipelines.

AWS presents quite a lot of helpful options to purchasers, reminiscent of the flexibility for web sites and apps to routinely scale compute and server capability up and down as wanted to deal with ebbs and flows in visitors. It additionally has information facilities world wide. That type of infrastructure is engaging to firms that serve a world viewers and want 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 reminiscent of 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 listing 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 well-liked companies like Lyft, Venmo and Alexa, primarily based on our editors’ private experiences as of this time.