Top News

New Delhi: A significant Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on October 20, 2025, disrupted numerous major online platforms, highlighting the critical role of cloud infrastructure in the digital ecosystem.

Widespread Disruptions Across Major Platforms

The outage primarily affected AWS’s US-EAST-1 region, a key hub for many internet services. According to Downdetector, over 15,000 users reported issues across various platforms, including Amazon.com, Prime Video, Alexa, Robinhood, Snapchat, Perplexity AI, Venmo, Canvas by Instructure, Crunchyroll, Roblox, Whatnot, Rainbow Six Siege, Coinbase, Canva, Duolingo, Goodreads, Ring, The New York Times, Life360, Fortnite, Apple TV, Verizon, Chime, McDonald’s App, CollegeBoard, Wordle, and PUBG Battlegrounds.

Amazon Diwali Offer: Save over ₹20,000 on Galaxy S25 in Amazon’s Diwali sale

Impact on Core AWS Services

AWS confirmed significant issues with several core services, including DynamoDB, Lambda, EC2, CloudFront, S3, API Gateway, SageMaker, IAM Identity Center, SQS, and Kinesis Data Streams.

These disruptions led to increased error rates and latencies, affecting both customer-facing and backend applications. Engineers were actively engaged in mitigating the issue and understanding its root cause.

Global Ripple Effects

The outage had global ramifications, with users in various regions experiencing service disruptions. In the UK, services like Snapchat, Ring, and banks were notably affected. Streaming platforms such as Disney+, Prime Video, and Hulu also reported issues. The disruption began around 8:00 AM UK time (12:30 PM IST) and was linked to problems in AWS’s North Virginia region.

AWS’s Response and Recovery Efforts

AWS acknowledged the increased error rates and latencies for multiple services in the US-EAST-1 region and confirmed that engineers were actively working to mitigate the issue and understand its root cause. While the root cause was not immediately identified, AWS committed to providing timely updates as their investigation progressed.

Amazon Diwali Offer: Save over ₹20,000 on Galaxy S25 in Amazon’s Diwali sale

This incident underscores the vulnerabilities associated with centralized cloud infrastructure. As businesses and services increasingly rely on cloud providers like AWS, the resilience and reliability of these platforms become paramount.

The AWS outage serves as a reminder of the interconnectedness of modern digital services and the potential impact of infrastructure failures on global operations.