On the morning of October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) — one of the world’s largest cloud providers — experienced a major outage that caused widespread disruption across the internet.
What Happened
According to AWS, the outage originated in its US-East-1 region (Northern Virginia) and was caused by a DNS failure, a core system responsible for routing internet traffic. When DNS issues occur, websites, applications, and services may become slow, unstable, or completely unreachable.
AWS has identified the issue and is actively working on a fix. Many systems have already been restored, but intermittent issues may continue as services fully recover.
Who Was Affected
Many well-known platforms reported disruptions (such as Slack, Zoom, Microsoft 365, Shopify and others) — while not all confirm the cause, the timing suggests a broad impact linked to the AWS outage.
However, these are just a few examples — many more applications and business tools have been affected across a variety of industries, including e-commerce, finance, logistics, and cloud communications. With millions of companies relying on AWS for hosting and backend services, the ripple effect has been felt worldwide.
What It Means for Businesses
Events like this highlight how interconnected modern technology systems are. Even a temporary outage in a single AWS region can cause performance issues for countless unrelated services.
For businesses, it’s a reminder of the importance of resilient IT architecture and redundancy planning. While AWS remains one of the most reliable providers in the industry, no cloud platform is entirely immune to downtime.
Final Thoughts
Although AWS outages are rare, today’s event underscores how dependent both businesses and consumers are on cloud infrastructure. As AWS continues its restoration efforts, most affected platforms are already stabilizing, and service should be fully restored soon.