Massive AWS Outage Disrupts Major Apps; DNS Issue in us-east-1 Blamed

A widespread Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage left many apps and sites offline or sluggish, including Alexa, Venmo, Lyft, Snapchat, Canva, Fortnite, Reddit, Disney+, Apple Music, Pinterest, Roblox, banks, airlines, and news outlets. The disruption centered on the heavily used US-EAST-1 (N. Virginia) region.

AWS identified the trigger as DNS resolution issues for DynamoDB API endpoints. While the DNS problem was mitigated early in the day, cascading dependencies caused lingering issues—especially with EC2 instance launches—leading AWS to temporarily rate-limit new launches in the region to aid recovery. Amazon later said services were restored, with backlogs clearing over time.

What happened

• Initial impact: Increased error rates and latencies across multiple AWS services in us-east-1.
• Root cause: DNS resolution issues affecting regional DynamoDB endpoints.
• Timeline (ET): Errors began overnight (around 3:11 AM); AWS confirmed DNS mitigation by morning; by mid-afternoon it reported normal operations; an evening update confirmed resolution of elevated error rates.
• Knock-on effects: AWS temporarily rate-limited new EC2 instance launches in us-east-1 and advised avoiding AZ-specific deployments during restoration.

Why it matters

As of mid-2025, AWS is estimated to hold roughly 30% of global cloud infrastructure share. Outages in a single, highly concentrated region like us-east-1 can ripple across the internet. The incident underscores concentration risk and the need for multi-region architectures, graceful degradation, and tested failover plans for critical workloads.

Takeaways for teams on AWS

• Design for region-level failures (active-active or warm standby across regions).
• Avoid single-AZ coupling and use health checks/deployments that can bypass a failing zone.
• Harden DNS and service discovery to tolerate resolver/endpoint issues.
• Regularly run game-day failover drills and understand provider rate limits during recoveries.

Helpful links

• AWS Service Health Dashboard
• Reddit Status · Epic Games (Fortnite) Status · Snapchat Status
• Downdetector (service reports)

One expert analogy: the data was safe, but apps temporarily “couldn’t find it,” illustrating how DNS failures can sever access to otherwise healthy backends. Even robust designs can feel the impact when a widely used region stumbles.

Discussion: After this outage, what resiliency improvements will you prioritize—multi-region, alternative providers, or better incident communications?