AWS US‑EAST‑1 Outage Mitigated, Services Recovering

In the early hours of Oct. 20, 2025, a major Amazon Web Services outage centered in the US‑EAST‑1 region — driven by DNS resolution failures affecting DynamoDB — caused widespread downtime and severe latency across dozens of high‑traffic apps and services worldwide. Platforms impacted included Coinbase and Robinhood (locking traders out and disrupting orders), consumer and social apps such as Snapchat, Reddit, Duolingo and Perplexity, gaming networks like Fortnite and Roblox, and banking and government services including Lloyds/Halifax/Bank of Scotland and HMRC. Users and businesses reported outages and high error rates lasting more than two hours in many cases, disrupting trades, travel bookings and other real‑world operations. AWS said the underlying DNS/DynamoDB issue was fully mitigated and most services were recovering while teams worked to restore EC2 launch capacity and clear throttling; companies including Coinbase confirmed service restoration and that customer funds remained secure. The incident highlighted risks from heavy reliance on a single region and renewed calls for greater cloud diversification and resilience.