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It was around 3:11 a.m. (Eastern Time), on the night of October 19-20, 2025, when several websites and online services relying on Amazon’s AWS cloud computing platform (AWS, for Amazon Web Services) became inaccessible or very difficult to access.

Within a few hours, more than 17 million user reports from 60 different countries around the world were recorded. The scale of the catastrophe quickly became global, affecting several sectors minute by minute, including:

a. Social media
• Snapchat (outages and connection problems)
• Reddit (access difficulties)
• Signal (messaging problems)
• WhatsApp (disruptions)

b. Video games & entertainment
• Fortnite (very popular game)
• Roblox & Pokémon GO
• PlayStation Network (connection/access problems)
• Disney+ (streaming problems)

c. Finance & payments
• Venmo (PayPal payment service)
• Robinhood (trading platform)
• Coinbase (cryptocurrency exchange)
• Halifax and Lloyds Bank (in the United Kingdom)
• Mercado Pago (payment problems)

d. Amazon services & smart devices
• Amazon.com (the retail website experienced access problems)
• Prime Video (streaming problems)
• Alexa (for smart home devices and voice assistant)
• Ring (security systems and video doorbells)

e. Productivity & education
• Canva (graphic design tool)
• Duolingo (language learning app)
• Perplexity AI (AI service)
• Strava (fitness app)

f. Transportation and logistics
• Lyft (ridesharing service)
• DoorDash and Grubhub (meal delivery services)
• Delta Air Lines and United Airlines (problems with check-in and flights)

What really happened ?
The incident began in one of AWS’s largest data centers, the US-EAST-1 region (located in Virginia, USA), which is a crucial area for a large part of the global internet. The main cause was related to AWS’s automated system responsible for managing the DNS (Domain Name System) for the database service known as DynamoDB.

DNS can be compared to a telephone directory on the internet. It allows applications to find the appropriate address to communicate with the AWS database service (DynamoDB), where information is stored. A malfunction in the DynamoDB database directory (the DNS) deprived many AWS services and thousands of external applications of their essential data, causing a cascading outage across the internet. It took approximately 14 hours before AWS engineers were able to correct the situation and services returned to normal.

In summary, all services or applications that depended on the DynamoDB database, or other essential services in the affected AWS region, were potentially impacted, which explains the variety and global extent of the outage.

Lessons learned
This incident once again demonstrates the excessive dependence of the internet on a few large cloud service providers like AWS. When the infrastructure of such a dominant player fails or experiences problems, the repercussions are felt quite quickly on a global scale, where different sectors can see their services paralyzed for several hours.

While it is true that these kinds of problems cannot be 100% avoided, mitigation measures can be taken. Hence the importance of contacting the experts of BIZ WEB (www.bizwebpro.net) who will assist you in the development and launch of your websites, mobile applications and data analysis systems, while also implementing customized strategies that can significantly limit the impact of such blackouts.

Esaïe Louis
Cybersecurity expert