AWS Outage Disrupts Major Online Services Across North America and Europe

On Monday, October 20, 2025, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage in the US-EAST-1 region (Northern Virginia) led to significant disruptions across various online platforms in North America and Europe. The incident affected AWS services such as Amazon Music, Prime Video, and Amazon Alexa, as well as third-party applications including Signal, WhatsApp, Snapchat, IMDb, Disney+, Fortnite, Roblox, and Wordle.

AWS reported that the issue originated from network connectivity problems within the US-EAST-1 region, resulting in increased error rates and latencies for multiple services. In a status update, AWS stated, "We have confirmed multiple AWS services experienced network connectivity issues in the US-EAST-1 Region. We are seeing early signs of recovery for the connectivity issues and are continuing to investigate the root cause."

E-commerce experts cautioned that the outage could have lasting effects on businesses operating online. Monica Eaton, Founder and CEO of Chargebacks911 and Fi911, noted that such incidents often lead to customer confusion and potential chargebacks. She advised businesses to proactively address these issues by running duplicate charge sweeps, notifying affected users, and issuing prompt refunds.

Ismael Wrixen, CEO of ThriveCart, emphasized the need for robust infrastructure planning, stating that the outage serves as a reminder that 100% uptime is unattainable. He highlighted the importance of multi-regional redundancy and intelligent architecture to mitigate the impact of such disruptions.

The exact cause of the outage remains under investigation. AWS has experienced similar incidents in the past, including outages in June 2023 and December 2021, both affecting various services and dependent companies.