AWS outage disrupts major apps globally; Amazon reports “full mitigation” of US-East issue

A widespread outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on October 20, 2025, caused major disruptions across gaming, fintech, social-media and government services globally. AWS identified the problem in its US-East-1 region (Northern Virginia) and stated the “underlying DNS issue … has been fully mitigated.”

The incident began in the early hours (about 12:11 a.m. PT) when AWS flagged increased error rates and latencies across multiple services. Many platforms relying on AWS cloud infrastructure — including Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo, Robinhood and Signal — reported outages or degraded performance.

Scope and sectors affected

Gaming platforms were among the first to report issues: Fortnite, Roblox, and Clash Royale users experienced login failures and disrupted play. Financial services suffered as well — Robinhood, Venmo and other apps saw service interruptions. Government and telecom services in the UK also reported problems; HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) and banks like Lloyds Bank acknowledged AWS-related disruptions.

The root cause was a failure involving AWS’s DynamoDB database service and related DNS infrastructure inside the US-East-1 region. According to multiple reports, the issue affected more than 70 AWS services before mitigations took hold.

Recovery status

While AWS has declared the main flaw “fully mitigated,” company updates and tracking sites indicate that some services are still clearing backlogs of queued operations. AWS advises that while most requests should now succeed, users might still experience higher latency or throttled performance.

Outage-tracking site Downdetector showed a large drop in incident reports following AWS’s fix announcement, but some users — particularly those of Ring doorbells and Reddit — continue to report issues.

The incident underlines the dependency of many consumer- and enterprise-services on a small number of cloud-infrastructure nodes. Experts say the outage exposed fragilities in digital infrastructure: when a major region like US-East-1 falters, the ripple effects span multiple sectors.