Massive AWS Outage Disrupts Global Apps, Financial Services

A significant outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on October 20, 2025, primarily in its US East (Northern Virginia) region, disrupted dozens of major websites and applications globally, including Amazon, Prime Video, Snapchat, Fortnite, Roblox, Zoom, and Slack. The disruption extended to financial services such as Coinbase, Robinhood, Venmo, and major UK banks, as well as transportation, telecom, and smart home devices like Alexa and Ring, illustrating the vast dependency on AWS infrastructure. AWS identified issues with increased error rates affecting DynamoDB APIs and DNS resolution problems, which caused widespread cascading failures across many dependent services. The company reported beginning mitigation actions and observed significant recovery signs early Monday morning, though some users continued to experience residual issues. This outage highlighted the risks associated with centralized cloud infrastructure, as the failure had ripple effects across consumer, enterprise, and public sector platforms worldwide. AWS and Amazon have been providing updates via their service status pages but have not specified the precise cause of the outage.