A major outage at Amazon Web Services' US-EAST-1 region in northern Virginia caused widespread internet disruptions on Monday morning, October 20, 2025. DNS resolution issues affected numerous platforms, including Amazon's own services and third-party apps. The incident highlighted vulnerabilities in cloud infrastructure.
The outage originated in AWS's key US-EAST-1 region, located in northern Virginia near the US Capitol, and stemmed from DNS resolution problems. It began early on Monday morning, leading to interruptions across a broad array of websites and platforms worldwide.
Amazon's primary ecommerce site, Ring doorbells, and Alexa smart assistant experienced outages throughout the morning. Other impacted services included Meta's WhatsApp, OpenAI's ChatGPT, PayPal's Venmo, and multiple web services from Epic Games. British government sites also faced disruptions, alongside gaming platforms like Fortnite, Roblox, Wordle, and the Epic Games Store.
Work-related applications were hit hard, with Zoom, Slack, Canva, and Signal among those affected. Social media and communication tools such as Snapchat and Reddit saw interruptions as well. Reports indicated that some services, including Fortnite and what appears to be Battlefield-related gaming, began recovering later in the morning.
Amazon was nearing a solution by mid-morning, according to updates. The event underscored a persistent weakness in the internet's infrastructure, where reliance on a single cloud region can cascade into global issues. No specific timeline for full resolution was detailed, but disruptions were described as taking down 'wide swaths of the web' and giving the internet 'a very bad day.'
