UPDATE: A significant outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) crippled numerous websites and applications late last night, affecting millions of users across the globe. The disruption began at 11:49 PM PDT on October 19 and lasted until 2:24 AM PDT on October 20, leaving a trail of chaos in its wake.
During the outage, a wide array of services—including Venmo, Roblox, Fortnite, and United Airlines—experienced severe accessibility issues. Users reported being unable to complete transactions, access educational platforms, and engage in social activities online. The impact was felt immediately, with many students unable to submit homework and teachers unable to grade assignments.
In a statement, Amazon confirmed that the outage was due to DNS resolution issues affecting the regional DynamoDB service endpoints. By 12:26 AM PDT, the company had identified the problem and initiated recovery efforts. According to Amazon, the issue was mitigated by 2:24 AM PDT, but some internal systems continued to struggle with performance.
“After resolving the DynamoDB DNS issue, AWS services began recovering, but a small subset of internal subsystems continued to be impaired,” the company noted. “To facilitate full recovery, we temporarily throttled some impaired operations such as EC2 instance launches.”
This outage highlights the vulnerabilities within our digital infrastructure, as a single service provider can significantly disrupt the online experience for countless users. With the holiday season approaching, concerns are rising about the reliability of cloud services that underpin so much of our daily lives.
As AWS begins to stabilize, users are advised to check the status of their favorite apps and services for further updates. Observers note that such widespread outages may become more common as reliance on a few key platforms continues to grow.
Stay tuned for more updates as the situation develops.