AWS Outage: What Happened, Why It Matters, and How to Protect Your Business

A significant AWS outage recently swept the internet—impacting gaming apps, crypto exchanges, banking platforms and more. Discover what happened, why it matters and how your organisation can stay resilient.

Why the AWS Outage Caught the World’s Attention

On October 20 2025, a major disruption to Amazon Web Services (AWS) shook the foundation of the internet. The outage originated in the US-East-1 region—a major hub of AWS cloud infrastructure—and triggered elevated error rates and latencies across multiple services. (The Verge)

Global platforms such as Snapchat, Fortnite, Signal, crypto exchanges such as Coinbase and even government websites experienced outages or performance degradation. (AP News)

This incident is more than just a momentary tech glitch—it’s a vivid reminder of how deeply our digital ecosystem depends on a few large cloud providers like AWS and how an issue in one key region can ripple across the world. (The Guardian)

What Actually Happened: Causes & Timeline

The Root Cause

According to AWS’s status updates, the disruption stemmed from DNS resolution issues linked to its internal subsystem in the US-East-1 region. Specifically, the trouble involved the route through which many AWS services—including its DynamoDB API endpoints—resolve domain names to IP addresses. (WIRED)

These DNS problems meant that the doorway through which cloud services are accessed became clogged, producing elevated error rates and latencies across a broad spectrum of dependent applications. (AP News)

Timeline & Impact

• The incident began at approximately 3:11 a.m. ET when AWS first reported increased error rates in the US-East-1 region. (The Verge)
• By around 6 a.m. ET, many affected services began restoring connectivity; a full mitigation of the primary issue was reported by approximately 12:13 p.m. ET. (The Verge)
• The fact that a single failure in a major region caused such wide disruption underscores the scale of AWS’s influence—and the vulnerability inherent in concentrated infrastructure. (The Guardian)

Who Was Affected

The outage impacted many major names: gaming platforms (Fortnite, Roblox), streaming devices (Alexa), smart-home services (Ring), financial apps (Venmo, Robinhood), social networks (Snapchat, Signal) and even government services in the UK. (The Verge)

Why this Matters for Businesses & Users

1. Downtime = Real Cost

When your infrastructure is hosted on AWS—and especially if you’re heavily reliant on US-East-1—you face the risk that an outage may halt your application for hours. That translates into lost revenues, frustrated customers and brand damage. (N2W Software)

2. Single Point of Failure

The incident exposed a systemic weakness in cloud-centric infrastructures: even with redundancy, many services cascade into failure when core DNS or routing systems misbehave. (WIRED)

3. Regulatory and Trust Risks

For sectors such as banking and government, a cloud outage raises questions about supervision and resilience. As the UK government noted, why isn’t AWS designated as a “critical third party”? (The Guardian)

4. Reputation and Customer Trust

Apps that went offline during the outage may face long-term trust issues—even if they fully recover—because users remember the disruption.

How to Prepare and Protect Yourself

Diversify Cloud Regions and Providers

Don’t rely solely on one region (for example, US-East-1). Consider distributing workloads across multiple AWS regions or even across multiple providers (Google Cloud / Microsoft Azure) to minimise risk.

Monitor & Alert Proactively

Set up alerts for connectivity, latencies and error spans—not just service failures. Services like StatusGator or real-time outage maps provide extra visibility. (StatusGator)

Automate Failover and Recovery

Use infrastructure-as-code, auto-scaling and ASAP fail-over strategies. That way, if one zone or service misbehaves, the system can move traffic elsewhere with minimal manual intervention.

Conduct Regular Resilience Drills

Perform exercises that simulate cloud region failure. Make sure your team knows how to respond and recover.

Review Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) and Contracts

Make sure your cloud provider(s) commit to clear SLAs, and have plans in place for compensation or remediation in case of major disruption.

What to Do If an AWS Outage Happens to You

1. Check the Amazon Web Services Health Dashboard (for official updates) or monitoring tools like StatusGator. (AWS Health)

2. Notify your customers quickly—even if you’re still investigating. Transparent communication builds trust.

3. Activate your incident response plan: shift workloads, trigger fail-over logic, scale up alternative infra.

4. After service restoration, perform a post-mortem: identify root cause, evaluate impact, adjust your architecture.

5. Document lessons learned and update your risk and continuity strategy accordingly.

FAQs

Q1. What is the difference between an AWS outage and slower performance?
An AWS outage means a service is unavailable or severely degraded for a large cohort of users. Slower performance may be localised or isolated. The October 2025 incident involved elevated error rates across multiple services and regions, so it qualifies as a widespread outage. (AP News)

Q2. How often does AWS experience major outages?
While AWS has very high availability, there have been several significant service disruptions over the years—2011, 2012, 2017, 2021 and 2025 feature prominently in its timeline. (Wikipedia)

Q3. Does an AWS outage mean data is lost?
Not necessarily. In this incident, AWS attributed the disruption to DNS resolution problems, not data corruption or deletion. However, prolonged outages may impair access to data or services. (WIRED)

Q4. Can smaller businesses be impacted by an AWS outage?
Absolutely. Even if you’re a smaller user on AWS, if your infrastructure shares components or regions impacted by a broader issue, you may experience service disruptions.

Q5. What can a business do right now to reduce its risk?
Immediate steps: (1) Map your AWS dependencies by region and services. (2) Consider cross-region redundancy. (3) Set up real-time outage monitoring. (4) Develop a fail-over workflow and test it.

Conclusion

The recent AWS outage serves as a powerful reminder: when one cornerstone of the cloud infrastructure falters, countless digital services can fall like dominoes. Businesses that rely on the cloud must embrace proactive resilience—not as a luxury but as a necessity. By diversifying cloud architectures, monitoring rigorously, automating fail-over and practicing recovery drills, organisations can mitigate risk, maintain trust and ensure continuity—even when the clouds momentarily stumble.