With Amazon’s AWS issues fully resolved, the online world was left to parse through the postmortem on Tuesday.
It’s concerning and, yet, unsurprising to see how fragile the internet’s ecosystem can prove. When a central pillar like AWS goes down, it topples large chunks of the internet with it. We’ve seen it before with Google Cloud, Microsoft, CrowdStrike, and others.
The modern internet is vast but delicate. As many news outlets pointed out, a few big tech companies hold vast market share, and when those services go down, the downstream effects can be troubling. And that’s exactly how it played out on Monday.
The places hit by the outage vary significantly. It took out major social media platforms like Snapchat and Reddit, banks like Lloyds and Halifax, and games like Roblox and Fortnite.
AWS is a US giant with a large global footprint, having positioned itself as the backbone of the internet.
It provides tools and computers which enable around a third of the internet to work, it offers storage space and database management, it saves firms from having to maintain their own costly set-ups, and it also connects traffic to those platforms.
That’s how it sells its services: let us look after your business’s computing needs for you.
But on Monday, something very mundane went very wrong: a common kind of outage known as a Domain Name System (DNS) error.
Summary of the Amazon DynamoDB Service Disruption in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region
We wanted to provide you with some additional information about the service disruption that occurred in the N. Virginia (us-east-1) Region on October 19 and 20, 2025. While the event started at 11:48 PM PDT on October 19 and ended at 2:20 PM PDT on October 20, there were three distinct periods of impact to customer applications. First, between 11:48 PM on October 19 and 2:40 AM on October 20, Amazon DynamoDB experienced increased API error rates in the N. Virginia (us-east-1) Region. Second, between 5:30 AM and 2:09 PM on October 20, Network Load Balancer (NLB) experienced increased connection errors for some load balancers in the N. Virginia (us-east-1) Region. This was caused by health check failures in the NLB fleet, which resulted in increased connection errors on some NLBs. Third, between 2:25 AM and 10:36 AM on October 20, new EC2 instance launches failed and, while instance launches began to succeed from 10:37 AM, some newly launched instances experienced connectivity issues which were resolved by 1:50 PM.
DynamoDB
Between 11:48 PM PDT on October 19 and 2:40 AM PDT on October 20, customers experienced increased Amazon DynamoDB API error rates in the N. Virginia (us-east-1) Region. During this period, customers and other AWS services with dependencies on DynamoDB were unable to establish new connections to the service. The incident was triggered by a latent defect within the service’s automated DNS management system that caused endpoint resolution failures for DynamoDB.
