Massive AWS US‑EAST‑1 Outage Disrupts Alexa, Venmo, Snapchat and More

On October 20, 2025, a major outage in Amazon Web Services’ US‑EAST‑1 region caused widespread disruption across numerous websites, apps and online services. The interruption traced back to a DNS resolution problem with the DynamoDB API, leaving many applications unable to locate critical data even though the data itself remained intact.

Key impacts were reported across consumer and enterprise services, producing sluggish responses, error pages and feature failures. Notable services affected included:

• Amazon Alexa (voice queries and smart‑home controls)
• Venmo and various banking/payment endpoints
• Snapchat, Canva, Fortnite, Roblox and other popular apps/games
• Media and publishing sites showing errors or slow loading

The incident timeline (times ET):

• ~3:11 AM — AWS reported “increased error rates and latencies” in US‑EAST‑1.
• ~5:01 AM — AWS identified a DNS resolution issue with the DynamoDB API as the root cause.
• ~6:35 AM — AWS said the DNS issue was fully mitigated and many services began recovering.
• Later morning — Knock‑on effects caused EC2 API errors and problems launching new instances; AWS applied mitigations and temporarily rate‑limited new instance launches to aid recovery.

Why this mattered: DynamoDB is a widely used database service on AWS, and many companies rely on the US‑EAST‑1 region. Even when data is safe, a DNS or API failure can make that data unreachable, effectively leaving apps “disconnected” from their backends. AWS warned clients not to pin new deployments to specific Availability Zones to give EC2 more flexibility while recovery continued.

Market context: AWS remains the largest cloud provider by share (roughly 30% of the global cloud infrastructure market as of mid‑2025), but this outage underscores how concentrated dependencies on a few cloud regions/providers can create systemic risk.

For more details and official updates, see AWS’s status page: status.aws.amazon.com and reporting from Engadget: Engadget’s coverage.

What you can do if a service you rely on is down:

• Check the official status pages of the service and AWS for updates.
• Avoid repeated retries that may increase load; wait for confirmed mitigations.
• Consider multi‑region or multi‑provider redundancy for critical systems to reduce single‑region risk.

Discussion: Did this outage affect any services you rely on today? How should companies balance the convenience of a single cloud provider against the risk of large outages?