On October 20, 2025, a disruption in AWS’s US-EAST-1 (Northern Virginia) region began as a local issue with DynamoDB. Within minutes, EC2 instances in the same cluster were also affected. What seemed like a local hiccup quickly cascaded into a global outage, disrupting applications, banks, and public services worldwide.

A Failure That Spread

The outage demonstrated the fragility of networks. Services outside the US-EAST-1 region began to fail, not because their infrastructure was directly down, but because they depended on APIs, authentication, or data pipelines tied back to Virginia.

Applications such as Snapchat, Fortnite, Duolingo, Canva, Wordle, Slack, monday.com, and Zoom went offline. Banking services at Lloyds, Barclays, and Bank of Scotland were disrupted, and even government services were affected. Millions of users across continents experienced downtime.

Complexity and Dependency

The October 20 outage was not just about downtime. It was about complexity and dependency.
Modern cloud systems are layered and constantly evolving. A small disruption in one service can trigger unexpected consequences elsewhere.
Applications rarely stand alone. They rely on databases, compute, DNS, APIs, storage, and third-party integrations. When one link breaks, the chain can collapse.
This incident showed that highly advanced infrastructure consists of numerous single points of failure that are connected within a concurrent system.

Transparency

Sophisticated infrastructure involves real-time monitoring. In the case of AWS, engineers communicate errors, acknowledge the issues, and publish a detailed post-incident analysis.
This transparency helps customers understand what happened, how it was mitigated, and what will be done to prevent next time.

Conclusion

Such events serve as a reminder that service outages are not isolated incidents. They spread through dependencies and can be amplified by them. Infrastructure has become increasingly complex over the past few decades, raising the question of how this journey will continue.

References

• AWS Outage of 2025: What Went Wrong and How It Shook the Web — Techstory
• AWS outage: How Amazon cloud outage affected the global internet — The Hindu
• Amazon’s AWS outage knocked services like Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo offline — Engadget
• AWS outage: A complete list of every site and app that went down — Dataconomy
• Amazon fixes huge AWS outage that broke much of the internet — TechRadar