Early Monday morning, October 20, 2025, millions of users woke up to broken apps, frozen devices and websites that simply wouldn’t load as a result of an AWS outage we're tracking live. Services like Snapchat, Ring, Alexa, Fortnite and even some online banking services went dark for several hours — all because of one cloud region in Northern Virginia.

AWS says the culprit was a DNS issue inside its DynamoDB service, which caused a chain reaction that rippled across the web. In simpler terms: one of the internet’s core address books temporarily lost track of where critical servers lived. Here’s how it happened — and why the effects were so massive.

A small failure in a big place

Around 3:10 a.m. ET, engineers at AWS’s us-east-1 data center (its busiest region) started seeing errors pile

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