AWS Fixes Major Outage That Knocked Out Major Services

A large-scale Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage happened on Monday morning, Oct. 20, 2025, knocking out internet services and systems globally. Starting from the US-East-1 region in Northern Virginia, one of Amazon’s largest data centers, the outage quickly spread, causing connectivity failures in applications dependent on the AWS ecosystem. The outage affected the services of many organizations, from government agencies and banks to gaming networks and crypto exchanges. Platforms with large user bases, like Venmo, Robinhood, T-Mobile, Snapchat, and Fortnite, reported connection failures and time-outs.

The root cause was a failure related to DNS resolution issues impacting the DynamoDB API within AWS’s internal infrastructure. IT teams had to work frantically to route workloads and keep uptime. AWS services were slowly restored throughout the day, and the outage was, in Amazon’s words, “fully mitigated“ by Monday night.

A Quick Analysis of the AWS Outage

CBT Nuggets trainer Scott Pletcher breaks down what happened during the AWS outage. He also explains the importance of DynamoDB behind the scenes. Watch the full video here.

The AWS Outage Revealed Overdependence

The incident showed how much of the internet still depends on a few large cloud service providers. When the AWS service failed, the effects cascaded throughout thousands of businesses that host applications, API, or servers inside its ecosystem. Even systems as far away as Europe and Asia were affected, with up to 60 countries reporting disruptions. The AWS outage also exposed blind spots in cloud redundancy. Many businesses were surprised to learn that their so-called “multi-region” redundancies still heavily relied on Amazon’s own DNS structure. 

The Fix

Amazon resolved the AWS outage through rapid response on multiple fronts. Once they identified the problem, AWS engineers developed several recovery routes simultaneously, with a special focus on DynamoDB.

AWS contained the primary DNS issues by mid-morning, and most core services returned online. Throughout the day, AWS continued releasing updates as it cleared backlogs and monitored system performance. They confirmed full restoration of service at about 6:35 p.m. ET. AWS said it will release a detailed report explaining what went wrong and how it plans to prevent it from happening again.

What IT Professionals Can Learn From the AWS Outage

The AWS outage is a reminder that no system runs 100% of the time. It’s worth checking whether your system’s backups and routing setups behave as expected when one region goes down. If possible, consider spreading workloads across more than one hosting provider and rethinking how your architecture handles multi-cloud and geographic load balancing. Testing disaster recovery procedures (before, not during) will also provide long-term benefits, helping you get back on track quickly and with less data loss.

If you’re looking to build up your AWS skills, CBT Nuggets offers training courses to help you design systems that can weather outages such as this. We offer training for various disciplines, including those for solutions architects, data engineers, and cloud practitioners. When you familiarize yourself with building fault-tolerant systems and setting up automatic backups, you and your team are more prepared when disaster strikes.