On this chilly October morning, it feels like half the internet is suffering from a hangover. A serious outage in Amazon Web Services took down scores of websites, apps, games and other services that rely on Amazon’s cloud division to stay operational. This includes a long list of popular software like Venmo, Snapchat, Canva and Fortnite. Even Amazon’s assistant, Alexa, stutters, and if you’re wondering why the Internet seems to be against you today, you’re not imagining it.
As of 1:15 p.m. ET today (October 20), it appears the outage has not been resolved. Several services remain unavailable, including asking Alexa for the weather or turning off the lights in your home. Venmo also appears to still be down, although their apps have all displayed alerts indicating that they are aware of issues affecting their services. The Lyft app is also slower to respond than usual.
According to the AWS Service Status page, Amazon was investigating “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services” in the US-EAST-1 region (i.e. data centers in Northern Virginia) as of 3:11 a.m. ET on Monday. At 5:01 a.m., AWS realized that a DNS resolution issue with its DynamoDB API was the cause of the outage. DynamoDB is a database that contains information about AWS customers.
Around 12:08 p.m. ET, the company released a small statement reiterating the above and adding that “the underlying DNS issue was fully mitigated as of 2:24 a.m. PDT.” According to the advisory, some Amazon customers “continue to experience increased error rates with AWS services in the Northern Virginia region (us-east-1) due to issues with launching new EC2 instances.” Amazon also said that Amazon.com and its affiliates, as well as AWS customer service support operations, were affected.
“Amazon stored the data securely, but no one else could find it for several hours, leaving the applications temporarily separated from their data,” said Mike Chapple, professor of computer science, analytics and operations at the University of Notre Dame. CNN. “It’s as if large parts of the Internet are suffering from temporary amnesia.”
As of 6:35 a.m., AWS said it had fully mitigated the DNS issue and that “most AWS service operations are now successful.” However, the ripple effect has caused problems with other AWS services, including EC2, a virtual machine service on which many companies build online applications.
At 8:48 a.m., AWS said it was “making progress in resolving the issue with the launch of new EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 region.” It recommends that customers not tie new deployments to specific availability zones (i.e. one or more data centers in a given region) “so that EC2 has the flexibility” to choose a zone that might be a better option.
At 9:42 a.m., Amazon noted on the status page that although it had applied “multiple mitigations” across multiple Availability Zones in US-EAST-1, it was “still experiencing high errors for new EC2 instance launches.” As such, AWS “limited the rate at which new instances were launched to facilitate recovery.” The company added at 10:14 a.m. that it was seeing “significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 region.” Even after all the issues are resolved, AWS will have a significant backlog of requests and other factors to deal with, so it will take some time for everything to recover.
Many, many companies use US-EAST-1 for their AWS deployments, which is why it seemed like half the internet was offline Monday morning. By mid-morning, tons of websites and other services were slow or showing error messages. Outage reports for a wide range of services streamed on Down Detector. In addition to Amazon’s own services, users have reported issues with banks, airlines, Disney+, Snapchat, Reddit, Lyft, Apple Music, Pinterest, Fortnite, Roblox And The New York Times – sorry to everyone whose Word streaks can be at risk.
Sites like Reddit have posted their own status updates, and while they don’t explicitly mention AWS, it’s possible that the services’ paths could cross somewhere in the pipelines.
AWS offers many useful features to customers, such as the ability for websites and applications to automatically scale compute and server capacity up and down as needed to handle the ebb and flow of traffic. It also has data centers around the world. This type of infrastructure is attractive to businesses that serve a global audience and need to stay online 24 hours a day. By mid-2025, AWS’s share of the global cloud infrastructure market was estimated to be 30%. But incidents like this highlight that relying on just a few providers to make up the backbone of much of the Internet is a problem.
Updated, October 20, 2025, 10:57 a.m. ET: This story has been updated to include a short list of affected services in the intro.
Updated, October 20, 2025, 11:17 a.m. ET: This story has been updated to include a reference to the Reddit status update website.
Updated, October 20, 2025, 1:15 p.m. ET: This story has been updated to include a paragraph reflecting the status of popular services like Lyft, Venmo and Alexa, based on our editors’ personal experiences at that time.
Updated, October 20, 2025, 3:15 p.m. ET: This story has been updated to include a short statement from Amazon describing a timeline of events, when the underlying issue was mitigated, and which parts of Amazon were affected.
