AWS Outage: Millions of Users Affected, What Caused It?

Liputan6.com, Jakarta On Monday, October 20, 2025, the digital world was shocked by a major incident that paralyzed most Amazon Web Services (AWS) services.

The AWS outage originated from a problem in one of AWS's primary data centers in the United States, US-EAST-1.

Downdetector's real-time report recorded more than 8.1 million problem reports from users globally, including 1.9 million in the US alone.

"These disruptions are not just technical issues, they’re democratic failures. When a single provider goes dark, critical services go offline with it — media outlets become inaccessible, secure communication apps like Signal stop functioning, and the infrastructure that serves our digital society crumbles," said Corinne Cath-Speth, Article 19’s head of digital.

The AWS outage on October 20, 2025, was widespread, affecting more than 2,000 companies worldwide.

AWS first reported the issue at 3:11 a.m. ET and said it was addressing an “operational issue” affecting 14 different services at its center in northern Virginia, in the heart of the US-East-1 Region.

In addition to the United States, significant outage reports were also reported in the United Kingdom (1 million) and Australia (418,000).

The initial problem was identified in the US-EAST-1 region, located in Northern Virginia, home to one of AWS's oldest and largest data centers.

Although centered in US-EAST-1, the effects of this AWS outage were not limited to a single geography.

The problem stemmed from an error with Amazon's EC2 internal network, which affected DynamoDB, SQS, Amazon Connect and AWS services, the company said.

"The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers," the company said in a statement at 11:43 a.m. ET

Specifically, the problem related to a DNS (Domain Name System) resolution issue with the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the foundation of the internet, translating human-readable web addresses into machine-readable IP addresses.

While DNS resolution issues can be a target for cyberattacks, there is no indication that this AWS outage was malicious.

The impact of the AWS outage extends to various popular digital platforms and services used daily.

Millions of users are directly affected, from difficulties with online shopping to inability to access social media or entertainment services.

Some of the major platforms significantly impacted include:

• Amazon (major retail sites, Alexa, Prime Video, Ring)
• Snapchat, Venmo, Disney+, Fortnite, Roblox, Coinbase
• Zoom, Canva, ChatGPT by OpenAI, Epic Games Store, Signal, Duolingo
• Slack, PlayStation Network, WhatsApp, Perplexity AI, McDonald's AppWordle, PUBG Battlegrounds, and UK banking services such as Lloyds Bank and Halifax.