An issue with Amazon’s cloud computing services triggered an outage early Monday morning that hit a number of websites and apps, including Amazon, Venmo, Ring, Slack, Whatsapp, Coinbase, Lloyds Bank, Perplexity, and more.
The issues started around 2:40 a.m. Eastern time Monday morning, when the online service Downdetector reported that Amazon Web Services was down, according to TechRadar.
A “Health Dashboard” run by Amazon showed at the time that there was an “operational issue” in North Virginia.
“We are investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region,” the dashboard announced at 3:11 a.m. Monday morning.
A downtime of this scale (where us-east-1 is involved) usually happens once every few years and is the most catastrophic downtimes of all. Actual incident being tracked on AWS’ service health dashboard:https://t.co/u8J99bykYb pic.twitter.com/XM4b2owURk
— Ananay (@ananayarora) October 20, 2025
Even airports were affected.
“Lines at LaGuardia airport in New York are growing at airline check-in counters,” The New York Times reported. “Kiosks appeared to not work and apps were down. Airport security lines do not appear to be experiencing any technical difficulties.”
Also affected was the encrypted chatting app Signal.
“PSA: we are aware that Signal is down for some people,” Signal chief executive Meredith Whittaker wrote on X at 4:02 a.m. Eastern. “This appears to be related to a major AWS outage. Stand by.”
By, 5:27 a.m. Eastern, Amazon reported “seeing significant signs of recovery.” By 6:35 a.m. Eastern, “most AWS Service operations” were working normally again, according to Amazon.
“Disruptions across dozens of websites appear to be easing,” The New York Times confirmed. “Numerous sites that had reported problems earlier on Monday were seeing fewer issues, including Slack, Snapchat, Reddit, the British government’s website and others.”
Speaking with CNN, TechRadar editor Lance Ulanoff said that the AWS outage hit so many sites and services because AWS “sits in the middle of everything.”
The AWS outage says more about $AMZN strength than weakness.
2 hours offline & most of internet stopped working. That’s how much of the world runs on their infrastructure. Same story with $CRWD when a <$100B company briefly stopped the world from moving
That’s real dependency.
— Shay Boloor (@StockSavvyShay) October 20, 2025
Ulanoff explained to the network that AWS offers businesses the opportunity to rent online services they need instead of building out the services themselves, the latter of which costs much more.
“It’s like: ‘Why build the house if you’re just going to live in it?’” he asked rhetorically.
He added that millions of devices, particularly smart home devices, aren’t designed to work without Internet access.
“They just don’t work without the internet,” he said. “They’re not designed that way. We’ve designed everything to work with that constant connectivity and when you pull that big plug, everything, basically becomes dumb.”
According to CNN, the outage was primarily caused by an issue with AWS’ DynamoDB database.
“Amazon Monday morning said its customers couldn’t access the data stored in DynamoDB, because the Domain Name System — a kind of phone book for the internet — had encountered a problem,” CNN noted.
“Amazon had the data safely stored, but nobody else could find it for several hours, leaving apps temporarily separated from their data,” University of Notre Dame professor Mike Chapple explained. “It’s as if large portions of the internet suffered temporary amnesia.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
