Global Outage Hits Amazon Web Services (AWS) on 21 October 2025 — Major Disruption to Apps & Websites

Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major global outage on October 21, 2025, disrupting thousands of websites and apps across multiple regions. The issue originated in the US-East-1 region and was linked to a DNS resolution failure that affected key internal systems, including DynamoDB and API endpoints, leading to widespread service interruptions.

Popular platforms such as Snapchat, Reddit, Venmo, Twitch, Signal, and Alexa were among those impacted, along with several banking and enterprise services that rely heavily on AWS cloud infrastructure.

AWS engineers worked through the day to restore functionality, and by late evening, most services were back online, though some customers continued to face residual slowdowns and queued requests.

The incident has reignited debate over the global dependence on a few major cloud providers, with experts warning that even a single technical failure can have worldwide repercussions for digital communication, commerce, and entertainment.