Forget your relaxing coffee break: the Internet exploded this morning. If your favorite apps froze or your screen displayed errors, it’s not unusual. On October 20, 2025, an unprecedented outage shook the Internet.
What caused the chaos? A massive outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud infrastructure that supports a significant number of services and applications we use daily.
AWS General Outage: Who Went Offline?
The outage monitoring site, DownDetector, turned red, highlighting the extent of the issue. The impact was immediate and widespread.
Among the major platforms affected were:
- Social Networks and Communication Apps: Snapchat and Life360 experienced significant disruptions.
- Entertainment and Gaming: Fortnite, Roblox, Clash Royale, and Clash of Clans players were halted, along with users of Amazon Music and Prime Video.
- Financial and Professional Services: Applications like Coinbase, accounting service Xero, and even the UK government site HMRC (the equivalent of our tax services) were impacted.
- Everyday Tools: Duolingo, Canva, and even telecommunications services like Vodafone reported issues.
In short, a significant portion of the digital ecosystem went into pause mode starting at 9 AM in France.
AWS: The Weak Link in the Infrastructure?
AWS is the invisible engine of the Internet. It provides computing infrastructure and data storage for thousands of businesses. When this pillar wobbles, a domino effect follows.
According to Amazon’s own updates, the issue stemmed from their facilities in Northern Virginia. The specifically affected services are crucial:
- Amazon DynamoDB: This is Amazon’s ultra-fast and flexible database service. Its outage renders data access for applications impossible.
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): This service allows users to rent virtual computing power. Without it, applications simply cannot function.
In simple terms: if you consider the Internet as a city, AWS supplies the electricity (EC2) and archives (DynamoDB). Without one or the other, the city grinds to a halt.
What to Take Away from This AWS Outage?
Resolution of the issue is underway, but the impact is clear: digital resilience should be an absolute priority for businesses and developers. An application must not only be fast; it should also be able to endure cloud chaos.
We await the technical details that Amazon will publish. In the meantime, we will monitor updates and take note: infrastructure is everything, and when it fails, everyone pays the price.
Update (12 PM): The good news is in: the AWS outage is now considered resolved, and normal operations are resuming across all affected platforms.
