AWS Outage Disrupts Major Services Including Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, and Venmo
On this crisp October morning, it feels as if half of the internet has gone dark. A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage knocked offline several websites, apps, games, and other services that rely on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure. Popular platforms like Venmo, Snapchat, Canva, and Fortnite were affected. Even Alexa, Amazon’s own voice assistant, struggled to respond. If you’ve been wondering why the internet seems broken today — you’re not imagining it.
Widespread Disruptions Continue Across Services
As of 1:15 PM ET on October 20, the outage had not yet been resolved. Several services, including Alexa and Venmo, were still experiencing issues. Lyft was also noticeably slower than usual.
AWS’s Service Health Dashboard reported “increased error rates and latencies” in the US-EAST-1 region (Northern Virginia) starting around 3:11 AM ET on Monday. By 5:01 AM, Amazon identified the cause — a DNS resolution problem affecting DynamoDB, a database service used by many AWS clients.
AWS Identifies the Cause
At 12:08 PM ET, AWS confirmed that the DNS issue had been fixed by 2:24 AM PDT. However, some customers were still facing problems when launching EC2 instances, the virtual servers that run many websites and applications. Even Amazon.com and its support teams were affected.
“Amazon had the data safely stored, but nobody else could find it for several hours,” said Mike Chapple, a professor at the University of Notre Dame, in an interview with CNN. “It’s as if large portions of the internet suffered temporary amnesia.”
Ongoing Efforts to Restore Normal Operations
By 6:35 AM, AWS said most services were running normally again. Still, the outage had caused a chain reaction, affecting several other systems.
At 8:48 AM, AWS announced it was “making progress” on fixing issues with new EC2 launches and advised customers not to tie deployments to one Availability Zone. This flexibility would help systems recover faster.
By 9:42 AM, Amazon had applied several fixes but continued to see elevated error rates. To stabilize recovery, AWS temporarily limited new instance launches. Later, at 10:14 AM, the company reported “significant API errors and connectivity issues” across multiple services. Even after a full recovery, AWS warned that it would take time to process the backlog of requests.
Why the Outage Felt So Big
Many companies host their applications in the US-EAST-1 region, which explains why the outage seemed to take down half the internet. By mid-morning, Down Detector was flooded with outage reports.
Services impacted included Disney+, Snapchat, Reddit, Lyft, Apple Music, Pinterest, Fortnite, Roblox, and The New York Times — a tough day for those trying to keep their Wordle streaks alive.
Platforms like Reddit posted updates acknowledging disruptions, though most did not directly mention AWS. Given how interconnected cloud systems are, many of these outages likely shared a common cause.
Lessons from the AWS Outage
AWS remains one of the world’s most powerful and popular cloud providers. It allows apps and websites to automatically scale to meet user demand and hosts data centers around the globe.
As of mid-2025, AWS controlled roughly 30% of the global cloud infrastructure market. However, this incident serves as a reminder of the risks of depending on a few major cloud providers. When one goes down, the effects ripple across the entire internet.