Why Did AWS Go Down? Go Behind the Amazon Outage Today

Everything from your favorite apps to major banking services stumbled on October 20, 2025, after an unexpected failure at Amazon Web Services.More than 4 million user-reported disruptions and a warning from threat-intelligence veteran Rafe Pilling — “any issue can cause a major upset” — pointed to the scale of the breakdown.

With AWS now tracking the fallout and restoring services, here’s a close-up look at what failed, why, and how the internet is getting back on its feet.What Is AWS? Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon’s cloud-computing division, offering on-demand services like data storage, computing power and networking to businesses and apps worldwide.

Why Did AWS Go Down Today? The outage that hit AWS on October 20, 2025 began around 3 a.m.ET in its US-EAST-1 region (Northern Virginia), where the company reported a surge in “error rates and latencies” affecting more than 80 internal services.

AWS eventually traced the disruption to a DNS resolution failure tied to its DynamoDB database endpoint.AWS stated the root cause was infrastructure-based, not a cyberattack, though the company did not offer full public details.

Is Amazon Still Down? Not entirely.As of the latest update, AWS reports that most affected services are now functioning again.

The company said it was seeing “significant signs of recovery” and that “most requests should now be succeeding.” Some users may still be experiencing delays or minor glitches, but the major disruptions appear to be mostly resolved.At 6:35 p.m.

ET, AWS shared a more detailed update, saying, “The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now.Some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution.

Additionally, some services are continuing to work through a backlog of events such as Cloudtrail and Lambda.While most operations are recovered, requests to launch new EC2 instances (or services that l...