Global AWS Outage: How One Region Switched Off Half the Internet
If on Monday morning, October 20, you tried to join a Zoom meeting, send a message on Slack, or play Fortnite, only to be greeted by an error screen—no, it wasn't your home internet's fault. The culprit is Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud backbone on which an absurdly large portion of the global internet operates. On Monday, that backbone failed.
Epicenter at the US-EAST-1 Node
As is often the case with global network disasters, it all started in one place: the US-EAST-1 region in Northern Virginia. It's one of the main and oldest nodes in the AWS network, which also makes it... well, a favorite source of problems.
Amazon itself officially confirmed that it had "increased error rates and latencies" at this data center. In cloud-speak, that's a diplomatic way of saying, "something broke very, very badly." The domino effect was immediate, cascading worldwide and leading to outages for tens of thousands of websites and applications.
Scale of Paralysis: From Messengers to Banks
Downdetector practically caught fire. Simultaneous spikes in reports came from services in almost every possible category. The outage made it clear just how many processes—from work to entertainment—we have entrusted to a single company.
The list of casualties reads like a "who's who" of the internet:
- Business and Work: Thousands of companies ground to a halt. Key communication tools like Slack, Zoom, and Asana were down.
- Entertainment and Gaming: Gamers were kicked from Fortnite and Roblox servers, and music fans lost access to Tidal.
- Finance (Fintech): Users of crypto exchanges (e.g., Coinbase), trading apps (like Robinhood), and payment systems (including Venmo) experienced moments of terror. Even traditional banks, like the UK's Lloyds and Halifax, reported problems.
- Daily Apps: You couldn't order a burger via the McDonald’s app, design graphics in Canva, or learn a language in Duolingo.
- Amazon's Own Backyard: The outage also hit the giant itself. The Amazon.com store, Prime Video streaming, and IoT devices had issues—Alexa smart speakers went deaf, and Ring doorbells didn't send notifications.
- Media: Even the largest news services, like The New York Times, the BBC, and Disney platforms, reported service interruptions.
What Failed? An Old Friend, DNS
According to Amazon's latest statement, the cause of the entire mess was a DNS system failure.
Simply put: DNS is the internet's digital phone book. It translates human-readable addresses (like google.com) into machine-readable IP numbers. When this system fails, services can't "find" each other. Servers try to communicate, but nobody picks up the phone.
Amazon announced shortly after 1:00 PM (CET) that the situation was "contained." However, users in many regions could still observe delays and residual issues for some time before the network fully returned to normal.
A Lesson in Dependency (Once Again)
The incident on October 20, 2025, is one of the largest global AWS outages in several years. It is also another cold shower, brutally reminding the global economy of its deep dependence on a single provider.
AWS controls about 30% of the entire cloud infrastructure market. It is a giant on whose foundations competitors, media, governments, and financial systems stand. Colloquially speaking: when AWS sneezes, the whole internet catches a cold.
Sources:
- Business Insider Polska
- Reuters
- The New York Times
- Bankier.pl
- SpidersWeb
- Money.pl
- Onet Wiadomości
- NBC News
Aleksander
About the Author
Dyrektor ds. Technologii w SecurHub.pl
Doktorant z zakresu neuronauki poznawczej. Psycholog i ekspert IT specjalizujący się w cyberbezpieczeństwie.
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