AWS Outage Knocks 1K+ Websites Offline; DNS Issue Blamed
Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant outage on Monday, October 20, 2025, affecting numerous global services and websites. The issue began early in the morning and persisted into the afternoon, with over 6.5 million reports of internet outages recorded by Downdetector. The outage was traced back to a Domain Name System (DNS) issue impacting Amazon's DynamoDB database. This issue prevented computers from locating the IP address of the database, causing widespread disruption. The affected database is a key component of AWS's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) network, which allows businesses to run their own virtual servers. The complexity of the issue lay in the vast number of systems relying on the affected database. Fixing the problem required careful coordination to avoid cascading failures. AWS engineers worked diligently, with significant improvements noted by late morning. By the evening, the company announced a full service recovery, with all systems expected to be back to normal by 0:01 AM on October 21, 2025. The outage, which knocked more than a thousand websites offline, highlighted the reliance of many businesses on AWS services. As a dominant player in the cloud computing market, accounting for 30% of the market share, any disruption in AWS services can have widespread global impacts. Amazon Web Services acknowledged the ongoing connectivity issues and assured users that they were working to resolve them.
