Tuesday 21 / October / 2025
Washington DC: Amazon announced on Monday that its systems are largely back online following a major outage caused by technical issues within its cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), CNN reported.
While the company reported it had "fully mitigated" the problem, users continued to experience residual delays across various services.
According to CNN, the disruption, which began overnight, temporarily brought down numerous high-profile websites, apps, and essential digital platforms across the globe.
Social media apps like Snapchat and Facebook, gaming platforms such as Fortnite and Roblox, streaming services including Disney+ and Hulu, and critical services like Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, and McDonald's all experienced service failures.
Financial institutions and crypto platforms, including Coinbase, also reported interruptions.
AI firm Perplexity and various smart home devices connected through Amazon's ecosystem were affected as well, CNN reported.
According to CNN, AWS confirmed at 1:26 am ET (10:56 am IST) that it was experiencing "significant error rates for requests".
The issue was later identified as a fault in the Domain Name System (DNS), which functions as the internet's address directory, converting user-friendly web domains into numerical IP addresses understood by servers. Though data remained secure, users were unable to access it, effectively separating many applications from their back-end systems, CNN reported.
By 6:35 am ET (4:05 pm IST), Amazon confirmed that the DNS problem had been resolved.
The company recommended that affected businesses clear their caches, temporary storage used to speed up service, to fully restore operations.
AWS also stated that it was monitoring lingering issues affecting other services, including EC2, a virtual server platform critical to many business applications, CNN reported.
During the outage, several companies took to social media to update their users and provide reassurance. Coinbase confirmed that all customer funds remained safe, while Perplexity AI acknowledged the disruption and attributed it to AWS infrastructure issues.
Throughout the recovery process, AWS provided updates on its official service health dashboard, noting at one point that it had identified the root cause and was pursuing "multiple parallel paths" to speed up the restoration.
While the company has not yet disclosed full details about the cause of the outage, it is expected to release a comprehensive postmortem report in the coming days, as reported by CNN.
Technology analyst Lance Ulanoff told CNN about the severity of the incident, highlighting AWS's central role in powering much of the internet.
He explained that modern smart devices and digital services depend on uninterrupted connectivity, and when a key provider like AWS goes offline, the ripple effects are immediate and widespread.
Industry experts estimate that the financial impact of the temporary shutdown could amount to hundreds of billions of dollars globally, considering the scale of disruption and the number of affected services, as per CNN.
AWS, originally developed to manage Amazon's own server capacity during high-traffic periods, has grown into one of the world's largest cloud computing platforms, serving governments, banks, media companies, startups, and multinational corporations alike.
