Amazon Web Services disruption: What do you think will happen in case of a big cloud outage?

In the event of a massive cloud service such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage, a good part of the internet is affected, and millions of people worldwide are affected. On 20th, October 2025, a massive outage happened in Amazon Web Services (AWS) affecting an enormous number of websites, programs, and cloud services worldwide. The inattentive websites, applications, and online services based on the cloud infrastructure are either rendered unavailable or fall out. This may involve essential applications like banking applications, games, streaming applications, and devices in smart homes, as well as communication applications.

The actual issue that causes such outages is usually a failure of some important pieces of the cloud, including a failure in software updates or the Domain Name system (DNS), the phone book of the internet that translates names of sites into IP addresses readable by computers. In case of DNS failure, applications will not be able to find the required servers and this will cause extensive connectivity issues.

With major services such as databases failing, other cloud services and supporting online platforms fail as well, which impacts the internet ecosystem in a domino effect. During such incidents, the number of services affected at once could reach thousands, and this can cause inconveniences to the users and business inconveniences. 

October 2025 Amazon Web Services (AWS) Outage: Causes and impacts

On 20th, October 2025, a massive outage happened in Amazon Web Services (AWS). The problem started at the main data center of AWS, the oldest and biggest of its data centers, in Virginia, where a technical update of DynamoDB, which is one of the major cloud-based data services of AWS, caused a DNS failure. The DNS system resembling the phone book of the internet did not find the API addresses of DynamoDB, and hundreds of platforms based on its data infrastructure were disconnected.

This DNS crash triggered a domino of failures affecting at least 113 AWS services and resulting in outages on high-traffic apps like Snapchat, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Zoom, games like Fortnite and Roblox, fintech apps like Venmo, and smart devices like Amazon Alexa and Ring doorbells. This outage took several hours and was partially restored in the first three hours but a full restoration was not made until the initial fix, as the network cleared a backlog of service requests. David Linthicum, Chief Cloud Strategy Officer at Deloitte Consulting LLP posted "The era of presumed hyperscaler invincibility is over," emphasising that organisations must adopt hybrid and multi-cloud strategies to enhance resilience amidst growing reliance on hyperscalers like AWS. 

Cloud failures: Uncommon but happen and cause havoc

Cloud failures show the extent to which contemporary life relies on internet infrastructure. With placing orders online as well as finances or even business, one outage can bring whole industries to a ground until it is resolved. 

However, cloud vendors strive to address them fast and reduce downtime and recover services. Such failures are fairly uncommon, but they bring up the vulnerability of centralised cloud systems and the need for redundancy and rapidity in cloud architecture.

The disruption has not necessarily driven companies such as AWS to lose their customers because the services are so massive and integrated. Users and businesses will have confidence in these providers to find solutions to the issues effectively and remain important in driving the digital world.

The road ahead

Although the disruption took place, AWS is a powerful force in the domain of cloud computing, whose services are deeply integrated and offered to users and companies, and it is unlikely that they could be switched to other providers in a short period. The outage is a lesson on the weakness of technology and the ongoing necessity of strong and hardy cloud infrastructure to sustain the digital ecosystem upon which business and daily lives worldwide rely.