Amazon's AWS outage knocked services like Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo and more offline

A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on October 19-20, 2025, disrupted a wide range of online services, including Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo, and many others. The outage was caused by a DNS resolution issue with Amazon's DynamoDB service, which affected the US-EAST-1 region. The outage led to increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services, leaving many popular websites and apps temporarily unavailable or slow to respond. Services like Venmo, Lyft, and Alexa were impacted, and users reported issues with banks, airlines, social media platforms, and more. Amazon worked to identify and resolve the underlying issue, which was fully mitigated by 2:24 AM PDT on October 20. However, the knock-on effects caused problems with other AWS services, including EC2, which led to further service disruptions. By mid-afternoon on October 20, most services had returned to normal operations, but it took time for the backlog of requests to be processed. The incident highlights the reliance of many companies on a few major cloud providers like AWS, and the potential risks associated with such a concentrated infrastructure. It serves as a reminder of the importance of diversifying cloud services and having robust disaster recovery plans in place.