On October 20, 2025, the world witnessed one of the largest internet disruptions in recent years. A massive outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused global-scale downtime across major online platforms — from gaming and streaming services to AI and finance.
This incident served as a powerful reminder of how deeply our digital lives depend on a handful of cloud providers — and how fragile the modern internet can be when that backbone falters.
When and Where the Outage Began
The disruption started at 3:11 a.m. (Eastern Time) in the AWS US-EAST-1 region, located on the U.S. East Coast.
This region is one of AWS’s most critical hubs, hosting millions of applications and handling a significant portion of global traffic.
AWS reported that “error rates and latency significantly increased across multiple services” and confirmed that engineers were “working through several parallel paths to accelerate recovery.”
Root Cause: Regional Gateway Failure
According to AWS, the outage originated from a regional gateway issue along the U.S. East Coast.
This gateway is a key part of AWS’s internal infrastructure — it routes data and connects services across regions. When it failed, traffic bottlenecks began forming, leading to cascading service failures.
A major spike in DynamoDB request errors intensified the situation, triggering a chain reaction that impacted numerous AWS-dependent platforms worldwide.
Global Services Affected
This outage didn’t just hit tech companies — it disrupted everyday life for millions. From entertainment to finance, the ripple effect was massive.
The affected services included:
- Gaming: Fortnite, Roblox, PUBG: Battlegrounds
- Social Media: Snapchat
- Streaming: Disney+, Hulu, Prime Video
- AI Services: Perplexity
- Crypto & Finance: Coinbase, Robinhood
- Other Major Apps: Canva, Reddit, McDonald’s app, Duolingo, Zoom, Airtable
- Amazon Services: Amazon.com, Alexa, Ring
Perplexity’s CEO Aravind Srinivas confirmed via X (formerly Twitter) that the issue stemmed from AWS and that the team was “actively working on mitigation.”
Impact in South Korea
The outage’s effects weren’t limited to the West.
In South Korea, AWS-based platforms also suffered disruptions. Samsung.com experienced intermittent access issues, while Krafton’s PUBG servers went down, preventing players from logging in.
Local companies relying on AWS faced both technical downtime and user trust issues, highlighting the broader business risks of single-cloud dependence.
Scale of the Outage
The monitoring website DownDetector recorded:
- 5,852 reports for AWS
- Over 14,000 reports for Amazon.com
These figures, logged around 3:44 a.m. Eastern Time, only reflect part of the scale — actual incident reports likely numbered in the tens of thousands.
Social media quickly exploded with posts under the trending hashtag #AWSdown, as users across the world realized how interconnected the modern internet truly is. 🌍
AWS Response and Recovery
AWS engineers were immediately mobilized to investigate and restore affected systems.
By 8:40 a.m. Eastern Time, outage reports began to decline, suggesting that recovery actions were taking effect.
In an update, AWS stated that they were “continuing to analyze the root cause and implementing measures to prevent recurrence.”
A Wake-Up Call for the Cloud Era
This incident underscored a growing reality of the cloud-dependent world: convenience comes with risk.
Major cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud form the digital backbone of today’s internet — but when one fails, the ripple effects can be global.
Experts point to multi-cloud strategies and regional redundancy as critical steps for businesses to prevent future large-scale outages.
For ordinary users, this was a reminder that the internet isn’t as invincible as it seems.
