Headline Roundup • October 20th, 2025
Major Amazon Web Services Outage Disrupts Internet
Summary from the AllSides News Team
On Monday, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage took services such as Duolingo, Coinbase, Snapchat, Venmo and Roblox temprarily offline.
The Details: The underlying cause of the outage, which affected millions of customers, has not been determined, but it demonstrated how much of the internet depends on Amazon's cloud platform. Amazon says it is "continuing to work towards full recovery."
Key Quote: “The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now. Some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution,” a statement from Amazon read.
For Context: AWS provides infrastructure for many state and local governments, as well as big-name companies.
How the Media Covered It: Sources across the political spectrum noted the impact of the outage when only a few "cloud compute" companies like Amazon provide the underlying infrastructure for online services.
Written by the AllSides staff (of humans). Learn more. Suggest an improvement to this summary.
Featured Coverage of this Story
AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes
Amazon said its cloud computing service was recovering from a major outage that disrupted online activity around the world. Amazon Web Services provides remote computing services to many governments, universities and companies, including The Associated Press. The first signs of trouble emerged at around 3:11 a.m. Eastern Time, when Amazon Web Services reported on its Health Dashboard that it is “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.” Around 6 a.m. Eastern Time, the company said that it was seeing recovery across most of...
A Monday morning Amazon Web Services outage downed dozens of major websites and apps worldwide for hours.
Amazon Web Services provides infrastructure for many big-name companies, as well as state and local governments.
Applications like Snapchat, Roblox, Duolingo and Fortnite were all affected, according to outage detecting site Downdetector.
The outage also affected Amazon Alexa, Ring cameras, airport kiosks and more.
A major outage has affected 'half the internet', with millions of people left unable to access sites including Snapchat, Fortnite, and Duolingo, as well as several banking apps.
At 11:35 BST (6:35am ET), Amazon said the underlying issue has been 'fully mitigated', adding that 'most operations are succeeding normally now'.
However, the outage continues to wreak havoc around the globe, with millions of customers still experiencing issues accessing their favorite sites.
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