Amazon outage 2025: What’s behind today’s massive AWS failure

It started early Monday morning, 20 October 2025, when users across Europe, the US and Asia began reporting problems logging in to major platforms. Within an hour, analysts confirmed the culprit: a major outage in Amazon Web Services (AWS) — the cloud network that powers much of the global internet. The disruption stems from the US-EAST-1 data centre region in North Virginia, one of Amazon’s largest cloud hubs, reports G.Business.

According to Amazon’s internal status updates, the company is facing “elevated error rates and latency” affecting its core infrastructure, including EC2 (computing) and DynamoDB (databases). Those two services sit at the heart of millions of websites and mobile apps, which explains why so many platforms crashed at once.

Global internet chaos: who’s affected

The outage has rippled across nearly every corner of the internet. Platforms and apps that rely on AWS for cloud computing have gone offline or slowed down dramatically.

By mid-morning, Downdetector was showing massive simultaneous spikes in outages across multiple services — confirming a system-wide infrastructure failure, not isolated bugs.

The heart of the problem: North Virginia

Engineers have traced the disruption to the North Virginia AWS region, also known as US-EAST-1, which handles an enormous share of Amazon’s global cloud traffic. The area is considered the “nerve centre” of AWS operations, and any technical fault there can cause global chain reactions.

Cyber experts note that Amazon’s regional architecture has long been criticised for its single-point-of-failure risk. When one of these key data clusters fails, companies around the world lose access to their own servers, websites, and databases in seconds.

When will services come back online

By 11 a.m. UK time, some recovery had begun, but users of apps like Snapchat, Roblox and Duolingo still reported login issues, missing data and loading failures. Amazon said its teams are “actively working on mitigation” but has not given a precise estimate for full restoration.

Cloud analysts expect a gradual recovery throughout the afternoon, with some systems remaining unstable until all backend traffic is re-routed.

A wake-up call for the cloud-dependent world

Today’s outage is more than a temporary inconvenience — it’s a stark reminder of the fragility of a centralised internet. When one company’s servers falter, the ripple effects reach billions. For businesses, the incident reinforces the need for multi-region backups, redundant cloud providers, and clear crisis communication protocols.

As of early afternoon, Amazon continues to restore services region by region, while users across the globe wait for a return to digital normality.

Stay connected for news that works — timely, factual, and free from opinion — and insights that matter now: Legal Prostitution in Europe and Germany: Principles, Locations, and Practice