Amazon Web Services is facing a significant outage affecting numerous platforms, including Alexa, Fortnite, and Snapchat. Customers are experiencing service disruptions while AWS investigates the cause.
AWS outage impacts Alexa, Fortnite, Snapchat
Operational issues reported in US-EAST-1 Region
Services down include Perplexity, Airtable, Canva
AWS began investigating at 3:11 AM ET
Previous outages occurred in 2020, 2021, and 2023
Restoration timeline unclear
On October 20, 2025, at 07:11 GMT, a malformed internal update to the Amazon DynamoDB API triggered an Amazon DynamoDB outage in the US East 1 region. This DynamoDB outage halts services across core AWS systems including EC2, S3, and load balancers, preventing clients worldwide from resolving service endpoints. The East 1 DNS resolution failure halts Amazon services platforms, impacting hundreds of applications and websites and demonstrating the global scale of the outage.[1][2][3]
Precise Chronology of Outage Detection and Service Restoration
07:11 GMT: DNS lookup failures and elevated latencies detected by AWS monitoring in US-East-1.[2][3]
07:15 GMT: Engineers isolated the fault to a malformed DynamoDB API change corrupting DNS entries.[1]
08:00 GMT: Initial mitigations restored network load balancer connectivity for most services.[3]
10:00 GMT: AWS declared full recovery of all 142 impacted services, warning of residual latency as request backlogs cleared.[2][1]
Global User Impact and Secondary Effects Beyond US-East-1
6.5 million+ outage reports filed on Downdetector across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, indicating widespread user disruption.[4]
Cloudflare status logs documented delayed DNS propagation and elevated error rates in secondary regions, showing spillover latency.[5]
Major enterprises temporarily failed over to alternate regions, averting complete business interruption.[6]
Key Services and Platforms Affected During Outage
Gaming and Entertainment: Fortnite, Roblox, Epic Games Store, HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu, Prime Video.[7][8][9]
Social Media and Messaging: Snapchat, ChatGPT, Signal, Reddit.[8][10][7]
E-Commerce and Financial: Amazon.com, Robinhood, Coinbase, Venmo.[11][7][1]
Smart Home and Security: Alexa voice assistant, Ring doorbell cameras.[12][13]
Productivity and Collaboration: Canva, Airtable, Zapier, Atlassian suite.[14][7][11]
Retail and Mobility: McDonald’s ordering app, Lyft ride-hail service.[7][8]
Technical Root Cause and Engineering Mitigation Steps
AWS’s post-incident analysis confirms the outage originated in the internal DNS resolution path for DynamoDB:
Rebuilt health checks on network load balancers to restore DNS integrity.
Disabled throttling on new EC2 instance launches to expedite scaling.
Drained and replayed queued API requests to clear backlogs.
All core AWS services were operating normally by 10:00 GMT, with residual backlog cleanup concluding by late afternoon.[15][3][2]
Comparative Overview of Historical US-East-1 Outages
Incident Date
Duration
Core Cause
Impact Scope
Source
November 2020
~5 hours
Network overload
Media streaming, e-commerce
The Verge [9]
December 2021
~4 hours
Networking hardware fault
Social apps, payment systems
The Verge [9]
June 2023
~3 hours
Control plane disruption
Food delivery, ride share
The Verge [9]
October 2025
~3 hours
DNS resolution failure
Global platform outages
Reuters [2]
Architectural Lessons and Recommendations for Resilience
The recurrence of major outages in US-East-1 highlights the necessity of:
Multi-Region Deployment to eliminate single-region single points of failure.
Multi-Cloud Strategies to diversify critical workloads across providers.
Real-Time DNS Monitoring with automated rollback capabilities.
Transparent Post-Mortem Reporting by cloud providers to drive accountability and improvement.
Adopting these practices can substantially reduce the risk and impact of future regional cloud failures.[16][6]
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Rachel earned her M.S. in Journalism & Media Studies from Stanford University (2018), where she developed expertise in media ethics, political communication, and digital storytelling.
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De redactie, oorspronkelijk opgericht door voormalige Engadget-medewerkers, combineert razendsnelle nieuwsgaring met diepgravende reportages over hoe smartphones, AI, sociale netwerken en klimaattechnologie het dagelijks leven vormgeven. Met een jongvolwassen publiek in het vizier publiceert The Verge dagelijks tientallen artikelen, video’s en podcasts die zowel de laatste geruchten over een iPhone-lancering als een 5.000-woord essay over de ethiek van algoritmes aan bod laten komen.
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Source post-mortem report details on the exact DynamoDB API change for precise root-cause.
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FAQ
Who within AWS is responsible for validating critical internal API updates before they reach production?
AWS relies on its Service Delivery and Reliability Engineering teams, in collaboration with DevOps engineers and automated CI/CD pipelines, to validate API changes through staged environments and comprehensive integration tests. Exact team names and internal processes are not publicly disclosed.
What additional safeguards can application teams implement to minimize disruption if US-East-1 experiences a DNS failure?
Developers can enable Route 53 health checks with failover routing policies, implement client-side DNS caching with appropriate TTLs, and incorporate multi-region endpoint configurations in their SDK settings to automatically switch to secondary regions when DNS lookups fail.
Where are alternative AWS edge locations or regional zones that enterprises commonly fail over to during major US-East-1 incidents?
Organizations typically fail over to US-West-2 (Oregon) and EU-West-1 (Ireland) due to their capacity and connectivity, while Asia-Pacific workloads often shift to AP-Northeast-1 (Tokyo) to maintain geographic diversity and low latency.
When does AWS plan to introduce automated rollback mechanisms for DNS configuration changes?
AWS has not announced a dedicated automated DNS rollback feature or timeline. Instead, Route 53 supports manual change rollbacks and health-check-triggered failover, which customers can configure today.
Why do changes in the DynamoDB API schema sometimes impact the broader DNS resolution path?
In AWS’s internal architecture, DynamoDB relies on service-discovery DNS records shared by multiple control planes; a malformed update to those shared records can corrupt lookup tables used by other services, propagating DNS resolution errors beyond DynamoDB.
What historic improvements has AWS made to prevent repeat outages of this scale?
Since late 2021, AWS has deployed segmented control planes for core services, expanded its Fault Injection Simulator for chaos engineering across DNS systems, and enhanced real-time metrics in Route 53 to detect and alert on anomalous DNS changes.
