AWS US‑EAST‑1 Outage (Oct 20, 2025): DNS/DynamoDB failure knocks many services offline

On the morning of Oct. 20, 2025, a major outage in Amazon Web Services’ US-EAST-1 region disrupted a wide range of websites, apps and online services. AWS reported increased error rates and latencies and later traced the root cause to a DNS resolution issue affecting the DynamoDB API — a widely used managed database service.

Here’s a concise timeline of events reported by AWS and covered in contemporary reporting:

• 03:11 AM ET: AWS noted increased error rates and latencies in US-EAST-1 (AWS Service Health Dashboard).
• 05:01 AM ET: AWS identified a DNS resolution issue with the DynamoDB API as the primary cause.
• 06:35 AM ET: AWS said the DNS issue was mitigated and most services were succeeding normally.
• 08:48–10:14 AM ET: AWS reported progress but continued elevated errors for new EC2 instance launches and applied rate limits to aid recovery.

The outage had wide downstream effects because many companies host critical workloads in US-EAST-1. Reported disruptions included apps and services such as Snapchat, Venmo, Fortnite, Alexa, Reddit, Lyft, Disney+, Apple Music, Pinterest and news sites — and users saw spikes in outage reports on platforms like DownDetector.

As AWS explained, customer data remained stored, but DNS failures temporarily made that data unreachable for some services. University of Notre Dame professor Mike Chapple described the situation as the internet suffering “temporary amnesia,” since systems could not resolve access to stored data.

Key takeaways and recommendations:

• Design for multi-AZ and multi-region redundancy instead of relying on a single region (US‑EAST‑1 is heavily used).
• Avoid tying new deployments strictly to particular Availability Zones; allow the cloud provider flexibility to place instances where capacity is available.
• Consider multi-cloud strategies or cross-region failover for critical services to reduce risk from a single-provider outage.

Context: AWS remained the market leader in cloud infrastructure with an estimated ~30% share as of mid-2025, which helps explain why a region-level failure can affect a broad swath of internet services.

For ongoing updates see the AWS Service Health Dashboard and reporting from major tech outlets.

Discussion: Were you affected by today’s outage, and what redundancy strategies do you use to guard against cloud provider failures?