AWS US‑EAST‑1 Outage Knocks Dozens of Services Offline

On the morning of October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services experienced a significant outage in its US‑EAST‑1 region (Northern Virginia) that caused widespread service disruptions. The root cause was identified as a DNS resolution issue affecting the DynamoDB API, leaving many applications temporarily unable to access their data.

The outage produced visible ripple effects across the internet: popular services and apps including Venmo, Snapchat, Canva, Fortnite, Alexa, Reddit, Disney+, Lyft and more reported errors or slowness as systems struggled to respond. AWS reported increased error rates and latencies starting at 3:11AM ET and later confirmed mitigation of the DNS issue by 6:35AM ET, though knock‑on impacts persisted.

• Cause: DNS resolution failure for the DynamoDB API in US‑EAST‑1.
• Immediate impact: Elevated API errors, latency spikes, and failures launching new EC2 instances.
• AWS response: Applied multiple mitigations, rate‑limited new EC2 instance launches, and recommended avoiding tying deployments to specific Availability Zones to allow flexibility.

Although critical data remained intact, many apps experienced temporary “amnesia” — unable to locate the data they rely on — which resulted in outages and degraded service for users. AWS said most service operations returned to normal after mitigations, but backlog and recovery processes meant full recovery took additional time.

Why this matters: Many organizations use the US‑EAST‑1 region because of its capacity and low latency; AWS still holds a roughly 30% share of the global cloud market as of mid‑2025. This incident highlights the risk of concentration: when a single region or provider experiences trouble, a broad slice of internet services can be affected.

For more details, see the AWS Service Health Dashboard and the original coverage on Engadget.

Key takeaways:

• Design for multi‑region redundancy where possible to reduce single‑region impact.
• Avoid tying critical deployments to a single Availability Zone.
• Expect recovery to take time even after root causes are mitigated due to backlogs and rate limits.

Update (Oct 20, 2025): AWS confirmed mitigations and continued to work on EC2 launch issues; several services reported status updates as they recovered.

Discussion: How did this outage affect you or your team, and what steps are you taking to reduce single‑region risk?