Massive AWS outage: Worldwide services paralyzed – This is how users react!

Massive AWS outage: Worldwide services paralyzed – This is how users react!

On Monday, October 20, 2025, the online world experienced a major setback when Amazon Web Services (AWS) was brought to its knees due to a significant system failure at its critical data center in Northern Virginia, USA. According to today.line.me, the impact of this incident is being felt across the digital landscape, with numerous services, applications and websites affected, most notably household names such as Coinbase, Fortnite and the McDonald's app.

The problems began on Monday morning and led to a massive increase in disruption reports on the Downdetector platform. The first alarms were received at approximately 8:40 a.m. CEST, and at approximately 9:11 a.m. Amazon confirmed the “operational issue” in the US-EAST-1 region. At the time, millions of users worldwide were affected, and the outage further highlighted the vulnerability that comes with the centralized structure of cloud computing. Technical analysts attributed the causes in part to flaws in the Domain Name System (DNS) and networking systems of the AWS database infrastructure, newsweek.com reported.

Services and companies affected

The outage led to a cascade of disruptions to many popular applications and websites. Those particularly affected were:

• Soziale Medien: Snapchat, Hinge, Reddit
• Gaming: Roblox, Fortnite, Clash of Clans
• Finanzdienstleistungen: Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase
• Streaming-Dienste: Prime Video, Amazon Music
• Regierungsdienste: Britische Steuerbehörde (HMRC)

Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, explained via Platform X that its service was completely down during the incident. The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) also reported problems, underscoring the magnitude of the outage.

Restoration and perspectives

Amazon said it was seeing “significant signs of recovery” after initial repair efforts. As the day progressed, most functionality should return to normal, but some services, such as Config and Redshift, continued to struggle with backlogs of requests. According to martinkaessler.com, the technicians are working intensively on problem solving and root cause research in order to avoid such incidents in the future.

The incident not only affected users, but also raises questions about how much businesses rely on centralized cloud services and how quickly problems in a single data center can impact the entire world. After all, many companies use AWS because of its scalability and cost efficiency instead of operating their own expensive data centers. AWS's market share is the undisputed leader at over 41 percent, followed by Google and Microsoft.

Overall, it remains to be seen what lessons will be learned from this massive outage and how AWS will respond to such challenges in the future. What is clear is that the Internet is a fragile network that depends on the stability of its core services, and this event is likely to spark further discussions about the security and reliability of cloud solutions.