Colossal AWS outage breaks the internet — Roblox, Fortnite, Zoom, Snapchat, and beyond all crippled
An ongoing issue
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has confirmed it is tracking a massive issue that has rendered large parts of the internet unusable. AWS says it has identified and fixed the main issue causing the disruption, but it could be some time before all affected services are back to normal.
A not-infrequent occurrence, Amazon confirmed at around 3 AM ET that it was " increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region," adding around 90 minutes later, "We can confirm significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region."
At 5 am ET, AWS stated, "We have identified a potential root cause for error rates for the DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region. Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1. We are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery. This issue also affects other AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. Global services or features that rely on US-EAST-1 endpoints such as IAM updates and DynamoDB Global tables may also be experiencing issues. During this time, customers may be unable to create or update Support Cases. We recommend customers continue to retry any failed requests. We will continue to provide updates as we have more information to share, or by 2:45 AM."
AWS is the infrastructure underpinning much of the online world; as such, the outage is causing a cascade of issues online, with many users unable to access a wide range of services.
U.S. users of Downdetector are reporting issues with Snapchat, Roblox, Amazon, Alexa, Ring, Robinhood, Max (HBO), Chime, Venmo, Epic Games, McDonald's, Fortnite, Lyft, Hulu, Disney+, Roku, Signal, and carriers including AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. PC gaming platform Steam, as well as online forums like Reddit, are also impacted.
Popular banking apps and tools like Zoom, Pokémon Go, PlayStation Network, and more are also struggling, as are some AI services such as Perplexity.
AWS stated at 5:20 am ET that it had applied initial mitigations and was observing signs of recovery, adding moments later, it was seeing "significant signs of recovery." Despite this, AWS says there is a backlog of queued requests to work through, so it may take some time for services you're trying to use to fully recover.
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At 6am ET, AWS confirmed, "We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS Services. We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered. We continue to work towards full resolution and will provide updates as we have more information to share."
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Stephen is Tom's Hardware's News Editor with almost a decade of industry experience covering technology, having worked at TechRadar, iMore, and even Apple over the years. He has covered the world of consumer tech from nearly every angle, including supply chain rumors, patents, and litigation, and more. When he's not at work, he loves reading about history and playing video games.
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HideOut Tons of other sites more imortant than those games too. Fidelity was and is struggling right now.Reply -
Former_Bubblehead No single company should ever be allowed to become so large that it can threaten to bring down entire portions of the Internet.Reply -
USAFRet Reply
Google, Amazon, Oracle....Former_Bubblehead said:No single company should ever be allowed to become so large that it can threaten to bring down entire portions of the Internet. -
upsetkiller Reply
Not a country, like usaFormer_Bubblehead said:No single company should ever be allowed to become so large that it can threaten to bring down entire portions of the Internet. -
salgado18 Reply
Most companies large enough should rely on multiple vendorsFormer_Bubblehead said:No single company should ever be allowed to become so large that it can threaten to bring down entire portions of the Internet. -
kep55 Reply
But, but, the cloud is perfectly safe, stable and secure. So what if it's just a bunch holes held together with vapor. Besides, it's FREE! To some people.Admin said:Amazon is tracking a massive AWS outage that has crippled large parts of the internet.
Colossal AWS outage breaks the internet — Roblox, Fortnite, Zoom and beyond all crippled : Read more -
USAFRet https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/20/amazon-web-services-aws-outage-hits-dozens-websites-appsReply -
GenericUsername109 Reply
Multi-vendor cloud setups may sound attactive from the top management point of view (resilience and reliability), but they would multiply development, testing and operations costs. Even just porting from one cloud provider to another as a one time endeavour can be very expensive and challenging.salgado18 said:Most companies large enough should rely on multiple vendors -
bit_user Reply
The issue I think you're trying to get at is a very valid concern: a single point of failure. However, whether a company has 70% of the internet hosting services market or 30% ...or even 10%, if that company has some critical issue, it would still break too many online services.Former_Bubblehead said:No single company should ever be allowed to become so large that it can threaten to bring down entire portions of the Internet.
So, if the thing we really want to achieve is redundancy, then focusing on market share is sort of beside the point. What's needed is a way to ensure that it's practical and affordable for all but the smallest customers to simultaneously use hosting from multiple providers. That requires potentially a different set of solutions than if you simply focused on marketshare. It basically means mandating some level of API compatibility over hosting providers' infrastructure. As a side-benefit, it would reduce the potential for vendor lock-in and thus foster greater competition.
I feel some of these issues on the customer end, since my employer is pretty much exclusively using MS Azure, as the foundation for our cloud services. I'm not directly involved with cloud development, but I deal with developers who are and therefore get a sense of just how deep our dependencies on Azure-specific technologies and APIs go. I have no clear idea of what it'd take for us to port our services to another cloud provider, but it would be quite a substantial undertaking. -
bit_user Reply
Do you know this for a fact? If so, can you cite examples?salgado18 said:Most companies large enough should rely on multiple vendors