The Morning the Internet Stood Still
If you reached for your phone this morning only to find Snapchat refusing to load, you weren’t alone. Across the globe, millions of users found themselves locked out of their favorite apps and services in a widespread outage that underscored just how interconnected our digital world has become.
The culprit? An hours-long disruption at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing giant that powers much of the internet as we know it. What began as connectivity issues with Snapchat quickly revealed itself to be part of a much larger pattern, affecting everything from banking apps to popular games and productivity tools .
The incident, which started in the early hours of October 20, 2025, sent companies scrambling to address the problems and left users searching for answers. Downdetector, the service that tracks internet disruptions, recorded a staggering 6.5 million reports from frustrated users worldwide, with over one million reports coming from the United States alone in just the first two hours of the outage .
What Actually Happened? The Technical Breakdown
At approximately 12:23 AM PDT, Amazon’s cloud services unit began experiencing significant issues in its US-EAST-1 region based in Virginia – one of AWS’s main data centers . The problem centered on DynamoDB, Amazon’s database service, which suddenly became inaccessible to many of the companies that rely on it to store and retrieve their application data .
The specific technical failure occurred in the Domain Name System (DNS) – essentially the internet’s phone book. This system is responsible for converting user-friendly web addresses into the numerical IP addresses that computers use to communicate. When DNS fails, it’s like the internet develops temporary amnesia; the data is still safely stored, but nothing can find it .
Mike Chapple at the University of Notre Dame explained it simply: “Amazon had the data safely stored, but nobody else could find it for several hours, leaving apps temporarily separated from their data. It’s as if large portions of the internet suffered temporary amnesia” .
Beyond Snapchat: The Ripple Effect
While Snapchat users were among the first to notice the problems, the outage quickly revealed its far-reaching impact across multiple sectors of the digital economy. Here’s how the disruption manifested across different services:
| Category | Affected Services | Impact Description |
|---|---|---|
| Social & Communication | Snapchat, Facebook, Signal | Failed to load/send messages; platform inaccessibility |
| Entertainment & Gaming | Fortnite, Roblox, Duolingo, Prime Video, Disney+ | Connection errors; blank game images; service disruption |
| Finance & Trading | Coinbase, Robinhood, UK banks (Bank of Scotland) | App access failure; transaction prevention |
| Productivity & AI | Canva, Perplexity AI | Design download failure; increased error rates |
The disruption extended to major airlines including Delta and United, with some carriers experiencing minor flight delays as their systems were affected . Even Amazon’s own services weren’t spared, with the retail website, Prime Video, and Alexa all facing issues according to outage reports .
Why Does One Company’s Problem Affect So Much?
The scale of today’s disruption highlights a fundamental reality of the modern internet: a remarkable concentration of digital infrastructure in the hands of a few cloud providers.
AWS dominates the cloud market with a 30% share and boasts a customer base of over four million businesses . When one AWS data center experiences problems, the impact is immediate and widespread precisely because so many websites and apps have built their operations on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure .
Professor Feng Li at the Bayes Business School in London noted that “complex distributed systems operate at enormous scale and inevitably carry systemic risk.” He added that “the breadth of impact – from consumer apps to financial and public sector services – suggests many organizations still underestimate the level of concentration risk in today’s digital infrastructure” .
The Road to Recovery
Amazon worked through the early morning hours to address the outage, identifying the root cause and implementing fixes. By mid-morning, the company announced that the “underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now” .
The recovery wasn’t instantaneous across all services. Canva, for instance, reported that users might “still see issues with downloading designs” even as other functionality returned . Similarly, Perplexity AI noted that while most services were operational again, they continued to monitor the situation closely .
Throughout the ordeal, affected companies took to social media and their status pages to keep users informed. Both Coinbase and Perplexity explicitly attributed their problems to the AWS outage, with Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas stating plainly: “The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it” .
Frequently Asked Questions
Was this outage caused by a cyberattack?
According to cybersecurity experts, there’s “no sign” that this was a cyberattack. Rob Jardin, chief digital officer at cybersecurity firm NymVPN, stated that it “looks like a technical fault affecting one of Amazon’s main data centers” .
Why do outages at AWS affect so many different websites and apps?
AWS is one of the world’s largest cloud computing providers, with millions of customers including some of the most popular apps and websites. These companies rent computing power, data storage, and other digital services from AWS rather than building and maintaining their own expensive infrastructure. When part of AWS experiences problems, all the businesses that depend on that infrastructure are affected simultaneously .
How long did the outage last?
The AWS outage began in the early hours of October 20, 2025, and was largely mitigated within a few hours. Some services experienced lingering effects throughout the day as systems fully stabilized .
Were any financial services affected?
Yes, several financial institutions reported issues. Major UK banks including Bank of Scotland, Lloyds, and Halifax experienced disruptions, as did trading platforms like Coinbase and Robinhood . These services assured customers that all funds remained safe during the technical issues.
A Wake-Up Call for the Digital Age
Today’s outage serves as a powerful reminder of both the remarkable efficiency and surprising fragility of our interconnected digital world. While cloud computing has enabled incredible innovation by allowing businesses to focus on their products rather than their infrastructure, it has also created concentration risks that become painfully apparent during disruptions.
As Marek Szustak, an IT security expert, pointed out, companies using the cloud should design their systems “so that a failure in one region or provider does not bring the entire business to a halt.” Geographical distribution of resources and testing of emergency scenarios “should be the norm, not a luxury” .
The next time you open Snapchat or any of the other services affected today, remember the vast, invisible infrastructure that makes such instant communication possible – and the importance of building resilience into the systems that have become so essential to our daily lives.
