Massive AWS Outage Disrupts Internet – Amazon, Snapchat, Prime Video, Canva, and More Down

In the early hours of October 20, 2025, the digital world screeched to a halt as Amazon Web Services (AWS), the backbone of much of the internet’s infrastructure, suffered a massive outage. Starting around 12:11 a.m. PDT (3:11 a.m. ET, 12:41 p.m. IST), a critical failure in AWS’s US-East-1 region in Northern Virginia triggered widespread disruptions, knocking out major platforms like Snapchat, Amazon Prime Video, Canva, and countless others. For hours, millions of users worldwide faced frozen apps, inaccessible websites, and stalled workflows, exposing the fragility of our reliance on a single cloud provider. While AWS declared the core issue resolved by midday, the fallout lingered, sparking debates about the risks of centralized cloud infrastructure. A Digital Domino Effect The outage began with a seemingly minor issue: elevated error rates in AWS’s DynamoDB, a critical database service that handles vast data queries for thousands of applications. By 12:11 a.m. PDT, AWS’s internal monitoring systems detected connectivity problems between customers and its network gateways in the US-East-1 region, a hub hosting over 100 data centers and serving as a critical gateway for global internet traffic. What started as a hiccup quickly snowballed, as failures in DynamoDB rippled to other core services
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