A widespread outage on Amazon Web Services (AWS) disrupted access to several major online platforms on Monday, October 20, 2025, affecting millions of users around the world.
The disruption, traced to AWS’s US-EAST-1 region in Northern Virginia, caused connectivity failures and slowdowns across multiple services.
According to a status update from Amazon, the company experienced “increased error rates and latencies” due to an underlying Domain Name System (DNS) issue, which has since been “fully mitigated.”
The outage temporarily brought down or limited access to several popular applications, including Snapchat, Fortnite, Roblox, and Canva.
Other affected platforms included Amazon’s Alexa, the AI search engine Perplexity, and various online banking and government services in the United Kingdom, such as Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland, and HM Revenue & Customs.
AWS said service recovery began within hours, though some users continued to experience intermittent issues as systems stabilized.
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The company confirmed that its engineers identified the problem within its network routing and database systems, adding that “most AWS service operations are now succeeding normally.”
Industry analysts noted that the incident underscores the heavy reliance of global digital infrastructure on a few major cloud providers.
AWS, which powers a significant portion of the world’s web traffic, has faced similar large-scale disruptions in previous years.