Amazon’s AWS outage has knocked providers like Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo and extra offline

On this crisp October morning, it seems like half of the web is coping with a hangover. A extreme Amazon Internet Providers outage took out many, many web sites, apps, video games and different providers that depend on Amazon’s cloud division to remain up and working. That features a lengthy listing of common software program like Venmo, Snapchat, Canva and Fortnite. Even Amazon’s personal assistant Alexa has been stuttering, and for those who’re questioning why the web appears to be in opposition to you as we speak — you are not imagining it.

As of 1:15PM ET as we speak (October 20), it seems the outage has not been resolved. A number of providers stay unavailable, together with asking Alexa for the climate or to show off lights in your house. Venmo additionally appears to be down nonetheless, although their apps have all displayed alerts saying they’re conscious of points plaguing their providers. The Lyft app can also be slower to reply than normal.

In response to the AWS service health page, Amazon was trying into “elevated error charges and latencies for a number of AWS providers” within the US-EAST-1 area (i.e. knowledge facilities in Northern Virginia) as of three:11AM ET on Monday. By 5:01AM, AWS had discovered {that a} DNS decision subject with its DynamoDB API was the reason for the outage. DynamoDB is a database that holds data for AWS shoppers.

“Amazon had the info safely saved, however no person else may discover it for a number of hours, leaving apps quickly separated from their knowledge,” Mike Chapple, a instructing professor of IT, analytics and operations at College of Notre Dame, advised CNN. “It’s as if giant parts of the web suffered short-term amnesia.”

As of 6:35AM, AWS stated it had totally mitigated the DNS subject and that “most AWS Service operations are succeeding usually now.” Nonetheless, the knock-on impact prompted points with different AWS providers, together with EC2, a digital machine service on which many corporations construct on-line functions.

At 8:48AM, AWS stated it was “making progress on resolving the difficulty with new EC2 occasion launches within the US-EAST-1 Area.” It advisable that shoppers not tie new deployments to particular Availability Zones (i.e. a number of knowledge facilities in a given area) “in order that EC2 has flexibility” in selecting a zone that could be a greater choice.

At 9:42AM, Amazon famous on the standing web page that though it had utilized “a number of mitigations” throughout a number of Availability Zones in US-EAST-1, it was “nonetheless experiencing elevated errors for brand spanking new EC2 occasion launches.” As such, AWS was “fee limiting new occasion launches to assist restoration.” The corporate added at 10:14AM that it was seeing “important API errors and connectivity points throughout a number of providers within the US-EAST-1 Area.” Even as soon as all the problems are resolved, AWS may have a major backlog of requests and different elements to course of, so it’s going to take a while for every little thing to recuperate.

Many, many, many corporations use US-EAST-1 for his or her AWS deployments, which is why it felt like half of the web was knocked offline on Monday morning. As of mid-morning, tons of internet sites and different providers have been sluggish or providing up error messages. Outage experiences for a broad swathe of providers spiked on Down Detector. Together with Amazon’s personal providers, customers reported points with the likes of banks, airways, Disney+, Snapchat, Reddit, Lyft, Apple Music, Pinterest, Fortnite, Roblox and The New York Occasions — sorry to anybody whose Wordle streaks could also be in danger.

Websites like Reddit have posted their own status updates, and although they do not explicitly point out AWS, it is attainable that the providers’ paths could cross someplace within the pipelines.

AWS affords lots of helpful options to shoppers, comparable to the power for web sites and apps to mechanically scale compute and server capability up and down as wanted to deal with ebbs and flows in site visitors. It additionally has knowledge facilities around the globe. That form of infrastructure is engaging to corporations that serve a world viewers and wish to remain on-line across the clock. As of mid-2025, it was estimated that AWS’ share of the worldwide cloud infrastructure market was 30 p.c. However incidents comparable to this spotlight that counting on only a few suppliers to be the spine of a lot of the web is a little bit of an issue.

Replace, Oct 20 2025, 10:57AM ET: This story has been up to date to incorporate a brief listing of providers affected within the intro.

Replace, Oct 20 2025, 11:17AM ET: This story has been up to date to incorporate a reference to Reddit’s personal standing replace web site.

Replace, Oct 20 2025, 1:15PM ET: This story has been up to date to incorporate a paragraph reflecting the standing of common providers like Lyft, Venmo and Alexa, based mostly on our editors’ private experiences as of this time.