Amazon Web Services (AWS), the backbone of much of the internet, suffered a significant outage starting around 12:11 AM PDT on October 20th, 2025, primarily affecting its US-East-1 region in Northern Virginia.
The disruption led to increased error rates, latencies, and connectivity issues across multiple services, including DynamoDB and EC2, cascading into widespread downtime for popular apps and websites globally.
High-profile platforms like Snapchat, Fortnite, Roblox, Disney+, Reddit, Canva, Alexa, Ring, Coinbase, and Venmo were among those knocked offline or severely degraded, leaving millions of users unable to access games, social media, smart home devices, and financial services.
In the UK, banking apps such as Lloyds, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland, along with government services on GOV.UK, faced interruptions.
Even airlines like Delta and United reported check-in system failures.
This marks one of the largest internet disruptions since the 2024 CrowdStrike incident, highlighting the risks of over-reliance on centralized cloud infrastructure.
AWS has confirmed that the issue has been fully mitigated, with recovery beginning mid-morning and most services restored by around 11:56 AM UTC (approximately 5-6 hours after the start).
User reports on Downdetector have significantly dropped, though some residual issues, like with Ring devices, may persist for a subset of users.
Real-time social media chatter reflected widespread frustration during the peak, including impacts on email and marketing tools like Grammarly, which experienced degraded performance.
For businesses dependent on AWS, such as email marketing providers, this outage underscores the vulnerability of single-provider setups, potentially leading to lost data, service interruptions, and revenue impacts.
With the cloud giant now stable, the event serves as a stark reminder to make independent, regular backups of your email list for maximum reliability.
