AWS US‑East Outage Disrupts Millions, Hits Hundreds

On Oct. 20–21, Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage centered in the us‑east‑1 (Northern Virginia) region that disrupted large parts of the internet and generated millions of Downdetector reports. AWS said DNS resolution issues in us‑east‑1 caused increased error rates and latencies across many services, affecting hundreds of companies and consumer apps including Coinbase, Snapchat, Zoom and parts of Amazon.com, as well as banks, airlines and government sites. Engineers mitigated the underlying DNS issue overnight, and AWS reported most services had returned to normal by Monday afternoon, though some errors and backlogs persisted. Analysts warned the outage could cost businesses billions and dealt a reputational hit to AWS, prompting renewed concerns about cloud-concentration risks and calls for regulatory scrutiny and political action. Cybersecurity experts urged firms to assume failure by design—using multi‑region or multi‑cloud strategies and resilience patterns—and Amazon pledged a detailed post‑event summary while customers were advised to consult the AWS Health Dashboard.