If you had trouble accessing some of your favorite websites and services on October 20, you weren’t alone. A huge swath of the internet experienced hours of issues with outages reported across numerous sites.
A fault with Amazon’s AWS services was to blame, with severe disruption having a huge knock-on effect to hundreds, if not thousands of services. Amazon’s own services, such as Alexa, Ring and Prime Video, were experiencing problems, as well as big names from around the web including Disney+, Hulu, Roblox, Fortnite, Zoom, The New York Times, McDonald’s and more.
After 15 hours of disruption, Amazon was finally able to signal the all clear, with its services fully restored.
AWS internet outage: key updates
- 03:53 PM PDT: Amazon issues statement detailing what happened.
- 03:01 PM PDT: All AWS services returned to normal operations.
- 10:03 AM PDT: “We continue to apply mitigation steps for network load balancer health and recovering connectivity for most AWS services.” This disruption has now been going on for more than 10 hours.
- 09:13 AM PDT: Amazon says it’s “seeing connectivity and API recovery for AWS services”
- 08:48 AM PDT: Good news! Amazon has “narrowed down the source of the network connectivity issues that impacted AWS Services.”
- 08:04 AM PDT: More investigations required by Amazon, as it looks into connectivity issues
- 07:29 AM PDT: Amazon confirms connectivity issues for users.
- 07:14 AM PDT: Uh oh! Things look like they’re getting worse. “We can confirm significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region.”
- 06:42 AM PDT: Amazon confirms it’s “still experiencing elevated errors for new EC2 instance launches.”
- 05:48 AM PDT: Amazon says it’s “making progress on resolving the issue with new EC2 instance launches in the US-EAST-1 Region.”
- 05:10 AM PDT: More successful actions as Amazon continues to work through the recovery process.
- 04:48 AM PDT: Amazon confirms plenty of services are still impacted while it continues to fix the issue.
- 04:08 AM PDT: Amazon says it’s “continuing to work towards full recovery”
- 03:35 AM PDT: “The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now”
- 03:03 AM PDT: Services continue to recover as Amazon continues “to work towards full resolution”
- 02:27 AM PDT: “We are seeing significant signs of recovery” Amazon notes. Thank goodness.
- 02:22 AM PDT: Amazon says it’s “observing early signs of recovery for some impacted AWS Services”
- 02:01 AM PDT: Amazon says it’s “identified a potential root cause for error rates”
- 01:26 AM PDT: Amazon says it “can confirm significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region”
- 12:51 AM PDT: Amazon confirms “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region”
- 12:11 AM PDT: Amazon confirms it’s “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region”
Why did AWS services go down?
Amazon released a statement on October 20 at 3:53 PM PDT, detailing the day’s events.
“Between 11:49 PM PDT on October 19 and 2:24 AM PDT on October 20, we experienced increased error rates and latencies for AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. Additionally, services or features that rely on US-EAST-1 endpoints such as IAM and DynamoDB Global Tables also experienced issues during this time.
“At 12:26 AM on October 20, we identified the trigger of the event as DNS resolution issues for the regional DynamoDB service endpoints. After resolving the DynamoDB DNS issue at 2:24 AM, services began recovering but we had a subsequent impairment in the internal subsystem of EC2 that is responsible for launching EC2 instances due to its dependency on DynamoDB. As we continued to work through EC2 instance launch impairments, Network Load Balancer health checks also became impaired, resulting in network connectivity issues in multiple services such as Lambda, DynamoDB, and CloudWatch.
“We recovered the Network Load Balancer health checks at 9:38 AM. As part of the recovery effort, we temporarily throttled some operations such as EC2 instance launches, processing of SQS queues via Lambda Event Source Mappings, and asynchronous Lambda invocations. Over time we reduced throttling of operations and worked in parallel to resolve network connectivity issues until the services fully recovered.
“By 3:01 PM, all AWS services returned to normal operations. Some services such as AWS Config, Redshift, and Connect continue to have a backlog of messages that they will finish processing over the next few hours. We will share a detailed AWS post-event summary.”
How long did the AWS outage last?
In total, AWS services were impacted for 15 hours on October 20, 2025, making it Amazon’s biggest AWS outage in a decade.
From our research looking at previous AWS outages, the previous longest outage of the past 10 years came in August 2019 when services went down for eight hours.
