AWS Outage Disrupts Major Online Services Globally

On October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major outage, leading to widespread disruptions across various online platforms. The incident began early Monday morning, with AWS reporting increased error rates and latencies affecting multiple services.

The outage impacted a wide range of platforms, including gaming services like Fortnite, Roblox, Clash Royale, and Clash of Clans; financial platforms such as Coinbase, Robinhood, Venmo, and Chime; and tech services like Snapchat, Signal, and Amazon's own Prime Video and Alexa.

In the United Kingdom, major institutions including Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland, Vodafone, BT, and the government's HMRC website experienced disruptions.

AWS identified the root cause as a DNS resolution problem at an Amazon data center in Virginia. By approximately 6:30 a.m. ET, AWS reported that most operations were functioning normally again, though some services continued to experience throttled requests during the recovery process.

This incident underscores the internet's heavy reliance on AWS's cloud infrastructure and highlights the potential vulnerabilities associated with centralized cloud services.