On this crisp October morning, it seems half the internet is dealing with a hangover A severe Amazon Web Services outage took out many, many websites, apps, games, and other services that rely on and continue to run on Amazon’s cloud division.
According to Amazon was investigating “increased error rates and latency for multiple AWS services” in the US-EAST-1 region (meaning the data center in Northern Virginia) as of 3:11 AM ET Monday. By 5:01 a.m., AWS realized that a DNS “AWS fell” resolution issue with its DynamoDB API was the cause of the outage. DynamoDB is a database that holds data for AWS clients.
“Amazon stored the data securely, but no one else could find it for hours, temporarily separating apps from their data,” said Mike Chapple, professor of IT, analytics and operations at the University of Notre Dame. . “It’s like much of the internet is suffering from temporary amnesia.”
At 6:35 a.m., AWS said it had fully mitigated the DNS issue and “most AWS service operations are now succeeding normally.” However, the knock-on effect causes problems with other AWS services, including EC2, a virtual machine service on which many companies build online applications.
AWS fell on its face
At 8:48 a.m., AWS said it was “making progress toward resolving the issue by launching new EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 region.” It recommended that clients not tie new deployments to specific availability zones (ie one or more data centers in a given zone) “so that EC2 has the flexibility” to choose a zone that might be a better option.
At 9:42 a.m., Amazon noted on its status page that although it had implemented “multiple mitigations” across several availability zones in US-EAST-1, it was still experiencing “advanced errors for new EC2 instance launches.” As such, AWS was “limiting the rate of new instance launches to aid recovery.” The company added at 10:14AM that it was seeing “significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple “AWS fell” services in the US-EAST-1 region.” Even once all issues are resolved, AWS still has a significant backlog of requests and other issues to process, so it will take some time to restore everything.
Many, many, many companies use US-EAST-1 for their AWS deployments, which is why half the internet appeared to be knocked offline on Monday morning. By mid-morning, many websites and other services were slow or offering error messages Outage reporting for wide range of services in down detector. In addition to “AWS fell” Amazon’s own services, users can access banks, airlines, Disney+, Snapchat, Reddit, Lyft, Apple Music, Pinterest, Fortnite, Roblox And The New York Times – To whom sorry Wordle Streaks can be risky.
AWS offers many useful features for clients, such as the ability to automatically scale up and down server capacity for websites and apps as needed to manage the balance and flow of traffic. It also has data centers around the world. This type of infrastructure is attractive to companies that serve a global “AWS fell” audience and need to be online around the clock. As of mid-2025, it was AWS had a 30 percent share of the global cloud infrastructure market. But incidents like these highlight that relying on just a few providers to form the backbone of most of the Internet is a bit of a problem.