A massive outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) has triggered a global wave of disruptions, affecting everything from streaming platforms to banking apps. The incident began around 08:00 GMT 2025-10-20, when users across the U.K., Europe, and North America started reporting connection errors and timeouts.
According to Amazon’s status page, the issue originates from the North Virginia (us-east-1) data-centre region — one of the most critical hubs in AWS’s global cloud network. Amazon confirmed it is investigating “increased error rates and delays” impacting core infrastructure services, including EC2 (virtual servers) and DynamoDB (database management).
As a result, several high-profile services went offline or experienced severe slowdowns. Affected platforms include Snapchat, Duolingo, Canva, Ring, Prime Video, Alexa, Roblox, Fortnite, Venmo, Robinhood, and Coinbase, among others. The outage also disrupted internal Amazon systems and customer-facing dashboards, underscoring the reach of AWS’s cloud backbone.
This event highlights a growing concern within the tech industry: the global dependency on a few centralized cloud providers. When a key AWS region goes down, the impact ripples across thousands of dependent services, demonstrating how concentrated modern internet infrastructure has become.
AWS engineers are working to restore operations, but as of publication, there is no official timeline for full recovery. Businesses and users worldwide are being reminded of the importance of redundant infrastructure and multi-cloud strategies to mitigate such cascading failures in the future.
Source: https://dataconomy.com/2025/10/20/amazon-down-widespread-aws-outage-takes-down-internet/