AWS US‑EAST‑1 Outage Knocks Dozens of Services Offline — What Happened and Why It Matters
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,…
