Updated October 20, 2025 at 3:12 PM MST

A massive outage at Amazon Web Services disrupted major websites and apps on Monday, in a show of how one company 's online infrastructure has become essential for many modern businesses to function.

Amazon said it was fixing the problem but some disruptions were still ongoing as of Monday evening.

Tech experts tell NPR the incident highlights just how vulnerable companies are to these kinds of outages.

Here's what to know about what happened and why a single outage could be so damaging.

The outage started early Monday

Amazon reported "increased error rates and latencies" starting around 3 a.m. ET that involved its facility in Northern Virginia.

Users reported trouble with popular websites and apps including Duolingo and the online games

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