Amazon’s AWS outage has knocked services like Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo and more offline

On this crisp October morning, it feels like half of the Internet is dealing with a hangover. The severe Amazon Web Services outage took out many websites, apps, games, and other services that rely on Amazon’s cloud division to stay up and running. This includes a long list of popular programs like Venmo, Snapchat, Canva, and fortnite. Even Amazon’s personal assistant Alexa has been stuttering, and if you’re wondering why the internet seems to be against you today – you’re not imagining it.

As of 1:15 PM ET today (October 20), the outage appears to have not been resolved. Many services are still unavailable, including asking Alexa about the weather or turning off the lights in your home. It also appears that Venmo is still down, even though all of their apps have displayed alerts saying they are aware of issues with their service. The Lyft app is also slower to respond than usual.

According to the AWS Service Health page, Amazon was looking at “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services” in the US-East-1 region (i.e., data centers in Northern Virginia) as of 3:11 a.m. ET on Monday. By 5:01 a.m., AWS discovered that a DNS resolution issue in its DynamoDB API was the cause of the outage. DynamoDB is a database that contains information for AWS customers.

At approximately 12:08 PM ET, the company posted a small statement that reiterated the above and added that “the underlying DNS issue was fully mitigated at 2:24 AM PT.” According to the notice, some Amazon customers “continue to experience increased error rates with AWS services in the Northern Virginia (US East 1) region due to issues launching new EC2 instances.” Amazon also said that Amazon.com and its subsidiaries, as well as AWS customer service support operations, were affected.

“Amazon stored the data securely, but no one else could find it for several hours, leaving the apps temporarily disconnected from their data,” said Mike Chappell, a professor of information technology, analytics and operations at the University of Notre Dame. CNN. “It’s as if large parts of the Internet are experiencing temporary amnesia.”

As of 6:35 a.m., AWS said it had fully mitigated the DNS issue and that “most AWS service operations are now succeeding normally.” However, the harmful impact caused issues with other AWS services, including EC2, a virtual machine service on which many companies build online applications.

At 8:48 a.m., AWS said it was “making progress in resolving the issue by launching a new EC2 instance in the US-East-1 region.” It recommended that customers not tie new deployments to specific Availability Zones (i.e. one or more data centers in a given region) “so that EC2 has the flexibility” to choose a region that might be a better option.

At 9:42 a.m., Amazon noted on the status page that although it had implemented “multiple mitigations” across several US-East-1 Availability Zones, it was “still experiencing elevated errors when launching a new EC2 instance.” As such, AWS has been “limiting the rate at which new instances are launched to aid in recovery.” The company added at 10:14 a.m. that it was seeing “major API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services in the US-East-1 region.” Even once all the issues are resolved, AWS will have a large backlog of requests and other factors to address, so it will take some time for everything to recover.

Many, many, many companies use US-EAST-1 for their AWS deployments, which is why it felt like half the internet was offline on Monday morning. As of mid-morning, many websites and other services were slow or displaying error messages. Outage reports have risen for a wide range of services on Down Detector. Along with Amazon’s own services, users have reported issues with the likes of banks, airlines, Disney+, Snapchat, Reddit, Lyft, Apple music, and Pinterest. Fortnite, Roblox and New York Times – Sorry to whom word The lines may be at risk.

Sites like Reddit have posted their own status updates, and while they don’t explicitly mention AWS, it’s possible the services will cross paths somewhere in the pipelines.

AWS provides many useful features to customers, such as the ability for websites and applications to automatically scale compute scale and server capacity up and down as needed to handle the ebbs and flows of traffic. It also has data centers around the world. This type of infrastructure is attractive to businesses that serve a global audience and need to stay online around the clock. As of mid-2025, AWS’s share of the worldwide cloud infrastructure market was estimated to be 30 percent. But incidents like this highlight that relying on a few providers to be the backbone of much of the Internet is a major problem.

Updated, October 20, 2025, 10:57 a.m. ET: This story has been updated to include a short list of affected services up front.

Updated, October 20, 2025, 11:17 a.m. ET: This story has been updated to include a reference to Reddit’s status update site.

Updated, October 20, 2025, 1:15 PM ET: This story has been updated to include a paragraph reflecting on the status of popular services like Lyft, Venmo and Alexa, based on our editors’ personal experiences as of this time.

Updated, October 20, 2025, 3:15 PM ET: This story has been updated to include a short statement from Amazon describing a timeline of events, when the underlying issue was mitigated and which parts of Amazon were affected.