Amazon’s AWS exit knocks services like Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo and offline
On this crisp October morning, it feels like part of the Internet is dealing with a hangover. The massive Amazon Web Services outage has taken out many websites, many websites, applications, games and other services that depend on Amazon’s cloud computing to stay up and running. That includes a long list of popular software like Venmo, Snapchat, Canva and A fork. Even Alexa’s own personal assistant Alexa has been frustrating, and if you’re wondering why the Internet seems to be against you today – you’re not imagining it.
There is good news now. At about 4:30 PM ET today (October 20), things seem to be returning to normal. Apps like Venmo and Lyft, which were slow to respond or completely unresponsive before, seem to be behaving well.
As of 1:15 PM ET, many services were unavailable, including asking Alexa for the weather or turning off the lights in your home. The Lyft app was also slower to respond than usual, and venmo transactions weren’t going through.
According to the AWS Service Health Page, Amazon was looking at “increased error rates and endpoints for many AWS services” in the US-East-1 Region (ie the data server in northern Virginia) as of 3:11 AM et Monday. At 5:01 AM, AWS assumed that a DNS resolution issue with the Dynamodb API was the cause of the outage. Dynami is the database that holds the information of new customers.
At approximately 12:08 PM ET, the company sent out a small statement that repeated the above and added that “the DNS downgrade was fully resolved by 2:24 AM PDT.” According to the notice, some Amazon customers “continue to receive increased prices with AWS services in N. Virginia (US-East-1) due to the introduction of new EC2 issues.” Amazon also said that Amazon.com and Amazon’s subsidiaries, as well as customer support operations for affected customers.
“Amazon was kept safe, but no one else could find it for a few hours, leaving applications temporarily separated from their data,” said the professor of Engfisetics and work at the University of Notre Dame, it was said Cn. “It’s as if large parts of the Internet suffered from temporary Arsnesia.”
As of 6:35 a.m., AWS said it had fully resolved the DNS issue and that “Multiple Services Operations are generally successful now.” However, the knock-on effect caused problems with other AWS services, including EC2, a multi-threaded resource that creates many Internet applications.
At 8:48 a.m., AWS said it is “making progress in resolving the dispute with the EC2 Advisory Group in the US-East-1 region.” Recommended that clients exclude new deployments for specific availability zones (meaning one or more data centers in a given region)
At 9:42 a.m., Amazon posted on its status page that although it was using “many reductions” in several availability areas in the US-East. The company added at 10:14 a.m. that it was seeing “major API errors and communication issues across multiple services in the US-East-1 region.” Even if all issues are resolved, AWS will have a significant backlog of requests and other things to process, so it will take time for everything to recover.
Many, many, many companies use US-East-1 for their AWS services, which is why it felt like part of the Internet was knocked offline on Monday morning. In between tons, tons of websites and other services were lagging or giving error messages. Comprehensive service output reports are programmed on the machine. Along with amazon’s own services, users reported news on the likes of banks, airlines, Disney +, Snapchat, Reddit, Lyft, Apple Music, Pinterest, Fortonite, roblox and The New York Times – Sorry to anyone – Nega is still a servant Streaks can be dangerous.
Sites like reddit have posted their status updates, and while they don’t specifically mention AWS, it’s possible that service paths could fall somewhere in the pipeline.
AWS offers a number of useful features to customers, such as the ability for websites and applications to automatically scale connection and server capacity as needed to handle the ebbs and flows of traffic. It also has data centers around the world. That type of infrastructure is attractive to companies that serve a global audience and need to stay online around the clock. As of RID-2025, it was estimated that AWS’s share of Cloud Infrastructure was 30 percent. But events like this highlight the reliance on just a few providers to be the backbone of the Internet and less of the Internet.
Update, Oct 20 2025, 10:57 AM et: This story has been updated to include a short list of affected services in Intro.
Update, Oct 20 2025, 11:17 AM ET: This story has been updated to include a reference to RedDit’s WHITE STATE PIPUPE WEBSITE.
Update, Oct 20 2025, 1:15 PM ET: This story has been updated to include a section showing the status of popular services like Lyft, Venmo and Alexa, based on our editors’ experience since this time.
Update, Oct 20 2025, 3:15 PM ET: This story has been updated to include a brief statement from Amazon explaining the timeline of events, when the underlying problem was mitigated and which parts of Amazon were affected.
Update, Oct 20 2025, 4:30 PM ET: This story has been updated to reflect the status of services like Venmo and Lyft as of Monday afternoon.
