Amazon Web Services (AWS) went down on October 20 2025 causing widespread disruption to many web services that rely on AWS cloud hosting including Amazon itself. According to Ars Technica :
“Ultimately, more than 28 AWS services were disrupted, causing perhaps billions in damages, one analyst estimated for CNN.
Popular apps like Snapchat, Signal, and Reddit went dark. Flights got delayed. Banks and financial services went down. Massive games like Fortnite could not be accessed. Some of Amazon’s own services were hit, too, including its e-commerce platform, Alexa, and Prime Video. Ultimately, millions of businesses simply stopped operating, unable to log employees into their systems or accept payments for their goods.”
Fortunately, October 20 2025 was a holiday in Trinidad and Tobago due to Diwali so business disruption was minimized – I know that users of Autodesk software such as AutoCad and Revit had difficulty running said software which would have disrupted the work of engineering firms.
Amazon has posted about this incident on its website :
Between 11:49 PM PDT on October 19 and 2:24 AM PDT on October 20, AWS experienced increased error rates for AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region, which also impacted Amazon.com and Amazon subsidiaries, as well as AWS Support operations. By 12:26 AM PDT on October 20, we determined that the event was the result of DNS resolution issues for the regional DynamoDB service endpoints, and mitigated the issue by 2:24 AM PDT. After resolving the DynamoDB DNS issue, AWS services began recovering, but a small subset of internal subsystems continued to be impaired.
The disruption of Amazon Web Services in one region resulting in disruption to so many third party websites, software and applications worldwide highlights the concentration of cloud providers by the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft and the challenges for third parties to continue operations if there is an disruption to one of the cloud providers that they have hosted their operations.
