Major AWS Outage Disrupts a Large Portion of the Internet A widespread outage at Amazon Web Services on October 20 caused significant disruptions across the internet, making numerous popular websites, apps, and online services slow, unresponsive, or completely unavailable. The incident, which began in the early morning hours, affected services including Venmo, Snapchat, Fortnite, and even Amazon’s own Alexa assistant. Amazon identified the root cause as a DNS resolution issue affecting the regional endpoints for its DynamoDB service, a key database that stores information for many AWS clients. While Amazon stated it had fully mitigated the underlying DNS problem by the afternoon, the initial failure created a cascade of subsequent issues. The primary impact was in the US-EAST-1 region, which is a major hub for cloud infrastructure hosting. The knock-on effects were severe, particularly impacting the EC2 service, which provides the virtual servers that power countless online applications. This prevented many companies from launching new instances to handle their workloads. Amazon implemented rate limiting on new instance launches to help the system recover, but this also contributed to the widespread service degradation. For users, this meant a frustrating morning. Many found that apps like Lyft and Venmo were slow or failing to complete transactions. Asking Alexa for simple information often resulted in errors. Popular sites like Reddit, Disney+, and The New York Times were also affected, alongside services from Bank of America, Apple Music, and Pinterest. The outage even impacted online games such as Fortnite and Roblox. By late afternoon Eastern Time, services began to stabilize. Apps that were previously unresponsive started to function normally again. Amazon confirmed that all AWS services had returned to normal operations by 6:53 PM ET. This outage highlighted the immense reliance that modern internet services have on a small number of major cloud providers. With an estimated 30 percent share of the global cloud infrastructure market, a problem at AWS can have a ripple effect, temporarily crippling a significant portion of the digital world. The event served as a stark reminder of the concentration of critical internet infrastructure. Websites and services affected by the Amazon Web Services outage included Amazon and Amazon Alexa, Bank of America, Snapchat, Reddit, Lyft, Apple Music, Apple TV, Pinterest, Fortnite, Roblox, The New York Times, Disney+, Venmo, Doordash, Hulu, Grubhub, PlayStation, and Zoom.
