Tuesday, October 21, 2025

Amazon Web Services Outage Disrupts Major Websites


An Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage Mondsa morning caused widespread internet disruptions, delaying services like the ESP used for this email.

At 12:11 a.m. PDT on Monday, AWS reported an “operational issue” in its US-EAST-1 region, centered in northern Virginia, a key hub for its global data centers. The issue impacted multiple services, leading to outages for popular platforms like Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox, United Airlines, and Venmo, as reported by Downdetector.

The disruption, caused by an “underlying DNS issue” (DNS acts as the internet’s phonebook, linking website names to IP addresses), has now been fully resolved. Most AWS services are back online.Monday’s outage highlights the internet’s heavy reliance on a handful of major tech providers like AWS.

Data from Built With shows that a whopping 76 million websites are based on AWS infrastructure, including more than 20,000 websites that earn more than $1 million every month.


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Originally developed from the e-commerce giant’s desire to build its own technology stack, AWS now rents out its infrastructure to customers that want to make their products and services accessible all over the world without having to drop millions to buy the capital-intensive hardware themselves. AWS is now a major profit driver for Amazon, contributing 53% of its operating income as of the latest quarter, thanks to its dominant market position ahead of competitors Microsoft and Google.

Interestingly, investors largely shrugged off the outages; the stock briefly dipped a little over 1%, but it closed trading on Monday up over 1.5%.

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