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BBC
bbc.com › news › articles › cev1en9077ro
What caused the AWS outage - and why did it make the internet fall apart?
But on Monday, something very mundane went very wrong: a common kind of outage known as a Domain Name System (DNS) error. People who work in the tech industry will be rolling their eyes right now. ... When someone taps an app or clicks a link, their device is essentially sending a request to be connected to that service. DNS is supposed to act like a map, and on Monday, AWS lost its bearings – platforms like Snapchat, Canva and HMRC were all still there but it couldn't see where they were to direct traffic to them.
Published   October 21, 2025
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ZDNET
zdnet.com › home › home & office › networking
The massive AWS outage that broke half the internet is finally over - here's what happened | ZDNET
October 21, 2025 - Amazon Web Services (AWS), the backbone of much of the internet, went dark early Monday morning. At approximately 12:11 a.m. ET on Oct. 20, it suffered a major outage, knocking out numerous websites, apps, and online platforms worldwide.
Discussions

Why was AWS outage so devastating?
Multi region redundancy is expensive, complicated and probably not worth it, so many companies don't do it. Combined with the fact that us east 1 is the largest and oldest region, when it goes down, a lot of things go down with it More on reddit.com
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October 21, 2025
Worldwide AWS Outage?
who else is on-call? let's goooo More on reddit.com
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October 20, 2025
Massive AWS outage takes down Snapchat, Reddit, Alexa, Ring and much of the interne
Even took down this title before it could finish More on reddit.com
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October 20, 2025
Non-Tech Here, Curious on AWS Outage Affecting Multiple Sites All Day
When a website has to handle people (users) going to the website and making use of the services on it that requires computers actually processing those decisions and actions by the users. In the past businesses would do this themselves by having dedicated computers (servers) handle that processing. They would have these computers on-premises and have their own IT handle expansion and maintenance of those servers. Nowadays most of the businesses and websites on the internet no longer have their own computers because of the time and investment needed to manage it and just rent the usage of computers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, or whatever hosting they choose to use. AWS normally has a 99.999% availability meaning that it normally has like a 5 minute total downtime for the entire year and for the most part they're very consistent about maintaining that availability. When it goes down that means the businesses that rent the usage from Amazon don't have any way to actually process incoming requests to their website and don't have a backup in place (because this usually does not happen) meaning that the websites go down. Huge amounts of the internet including the sites you mentioned use Amazon to host their sites and so when it goes down they also do. More on reddit.com
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Yahoo!
yahoo.com › news › world › article › amazon-says-a-dns-error-caused-the-aws-outage-what-does-that-mean-155418524.html
Amazon says a DNS error caused the AWS outage. What does that mean?
October 22, 2025 - The company says the Amazon Web Services outage that disrupted online activity for a large portion of the internet on Monday was likely caused by errors related to its domain name system.
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CNN
cnn.com › 2025 › 10 › 21 › tech › aws-outage-internet-vulnerable
Amazon’s global outage exposes major vulnerabilities to American life | CNN Business
October 21, 2025 - An Amazon Web Services (AWS) logo is pictured during a trade fair in Hannover Messe, in Hanover, Germany, April 22, 2024. REUTERS/Annegret Hilse ... Over in the broader Houston area, Dia Giordano was spending her Monday trying to untangle the mess that the outage made for her three businesses: an Italian restaurant, eight mental health clinics and a couple of rental properties.
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The Indian Express
indianexpress.com › news › explained › explained sci-tech
AWS outage 2025 explained: An AWS outage took down nearly the entire Internet. What caused it?
October 22, 2025 - Amazon web services down: An outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud services provider that underpins much of online platforms, took nearly the entire Internet down for several hours on Monday, underscoring the fragility of companies that use cloud-based servers to host their data and how suddenly an unplanned outage can affect businesses around the globe.
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Reuters
reuters.com › business › retail-consumer › amazons-cloud-unit-reports-outage-several-websites-down-2025-10-20
Amazon says AWS cloud service back to normal after outage disrupts businesses worldwide | Reuters
October 21, 2025 - SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 20 (Reuters) - Amazon.com cloud service returned to normal operations on Monday afternoon, the company said, after an internet outage that caused global turmoil among thousands of sites, including some of the web's most popular ...
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ABC News
abc.net.au › news › 2025-10-21 › amazon-web-services-aws-outage-explained › 105917274
What we know about Amazon's AWS outage and why it was such a big deal - ABC News
October 29, 2025 - On Monday, an issue with Amazon's computational infrastructure caused an outage that went way beyond impacting the internet giant's online shopping website. The AWS outage had wide-ranging global impacts, affecting some healthcare services, ...
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Tom's Guide
tomsguide.com › computing › internet
AWS was down — live updates following massive outage that broke the internet | Tom's Guide
October 21, 2025 - As part of our coverage, we looked at all the apps and services affected by the outage (and are certain we didn't catch them all) as well as how the outage happened and why it broke the internet. Helpful readers pointed out broken services like Canvas for college students and small business applications like Shopify and ShipStation that were affecting businesses and education. Separately, we monitored Snapchat and Venmo as both services seem totally out of commission and received the most reports. At around 12:11am PDT (3:11am ET, 8:11am BST), AWS started experiencing outages.
Find elsewhere
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Al Jazeera
aljazeera.com › news › internet
What caused Amazon’s AWS outage, and why did so many major apps go offline? | Internet News | Al Jazeera
October 21, 2025 - A major outage at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday disrupted a large portion of the internet, taking down apps, websites and online tools used by millions of people around the world, before services were eventually restored.
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Datacentremagazine
datacentremagazine.com › news › aws-down-the-billion-dollar-impact-of-cloud-dependency
AWS Data Centre Disruption Causes Global Service Outages | Data Centre Magazine
October 20, 2025 - Widespread AWS disruption underlines cloud fragility as key data centre services go offline, affecting apps, banks and enterprise platforms globally
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USA Today
usatoday.com › story › tech › 2025 › 10 › 21 › aws-outage-today-update-cause › 86813173007
Is the AWS outage still happening today? See update, cause.
October 21, 2025 - Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing service run by Amazon, said its services are back to operating as usual after an outage caused widespread issues across the internet on Oct. 20. AWS said the outage, which began around 3 a.m.
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The Guardian
theguardian.com › technology › 2025 › oct › 24 › amazon-reveals-cause-of-aws-outage
Amazon reveals cause of AWS outage that took everything from banks to smart beds offline | Amazon | The Guardian
October 24, 2025 - Amazon has revealed the cause of this week’s hours-long AWS outage, which took everything from Signal to smart beds offline, was a bug in automation software that had widespread consequences.
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GeekWire
geekwire.com › home › amazon › how the aws outage happened: amazon blames rare software bug and ‘faulty automation’ for massive glitch
How the AWS outage happened: Amazon blames rare software bug and ‘faulty automation’ for massive glitch
October 24, 2025 - The outage began early Monday and impacted sites and online services around the world, again illustrating the internet’s deep reliance on Amazon’s cloud and showing how a single failure inside AWS can quickly ripple across the web.
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The Pragmatic Engineer
newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com › p › what-caused-the-large-aws-outage
What caused the large AWS outage? - by Gergely Orosz
October 23, 2025 - On Monday, a major AWS outage hit thousands of sites & apps, and even a Premier League soccer game. An overview of what caused this high-profile, global outage
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Washington Examiner
washingtonexaminer.com › home › how do cloud service outages happen?
How do cloud service outages happen?
20 AWS outage was caused by error rates and latencies in the provider’s US-East-1 region in its data center cluster in Northern Virginia. HOW LOUDOUN COUNTY’S COMMERCIAL TAX BASE INITIATIVE TURNED VIRGINIA INTO A DATA CENTER HUB · DeStefano simply summed up the risk that outages pose to cloud service providers in three words: “loss of customers,” he said. Once an outage happens, it makes room for other providers, in the small, hyper-competitive landscape, to pounce.
Published   1 month ago
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CNN
cnn.com › 2025 › 10 › 25 › tech › aws-outage-cause
How a tiny bug spiraled into a massive outage that took down the internet | CNN Business
October 27, 2025 - The massive cloud service’s outage meant people couldn’t order food, communicate with hospital networks, access mobile banking, or connect with their security systems and smart home devices. Major global companies, including Netflix, Starbucks and United Airlines, were temporarily unable to give customers access to their online services. “We apologize for the impact this event caused our customers,” Amazon said in a statement on the AWS website.
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Pluralsight
pluralsight.com › blog › cloud
What happened with the AWS outage? | Online Courses, Learning Paths, and Certifications - Pluralsight
Over the next three minutes — which is pretty much all of a sudden, from our external point of view — a number of AWS services in the region started having issues, including but not limited to: ... Now, to be clear, the issue was not a complete outage for all of these services.
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Amazon Web Services
aws.amazon.com › premium support › technology and programs › aws post-event summaries
AWS Post-Event Summaries
5 days ago - When an issue has broad and significant customer impact that results in the failure of a significant percentage of control plane API calls, impacts a significant percentage of a service’s infrastructure, resources or APIs or is the result of total power failure or significant network failure, AWS is committed to providing a public Post-Event Summary (PES) following the closure of the issue.
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Thundergolfer
thundergolfer.com › blog › aws-us-east-1-outage-oct20
More Than DNS: The 14 hour AWS us-east-1 outage – Jonathon Belotti [thundergolfer]
October 26, 2025 - I’m on the right, biting a nail nervously. We’re in an Italian hotel because this happened on day 1 of our offsite. On Monday the AWS us-east-1 region had its worst outage in over 10 years. The whole thing lasted over 14 hours and affected 140 AWS services, including, critically, EC2.
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CU Boulder Today
colorado.edu › today › 2025 › 10 › 22 › aws-down-how-single-network-outage-rippled-through-businesses-institutions-and-economy
AWS down: How a single network outage rippled through businesses, institutions and the economy | CU Boulder Today | University of Colorado Boulder
October 22, 2025 - ... Outages like this can happen for several reasons, but most often it comes down to human or configuration errors that are amplified by the massive scale of operations at companies like AWS.