An Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage shut down a good portion of the Internet on Monday (October 20, 2025), affecting websites, apps, and services. Updates are still being released, but here's what we know so far.

At 3:00am on Monday morning there was a problem with one of the core AWS database products (DynamoDb), which knocked many of the leading apps, streaming services, and websites offline for millions of users across the globe.

The problem seems to have originated at one of the main AWS data centers in Ashburn, Virginia following a software update to the DynamoDB API, which is a cloud database service used by online platforms to store user and app data. This area of Virginia is known colloquially as Data Center Alley because it has the world's largest concentration of data centers.

The specific issue appears to be related to an error that occurred in the update which affected DynamoDb DNS. Domain Name Systems (DNS) are used to route domain name requests (e.g. fynydd.com) to their correct server IP addresses (e.g. 1.2.3.4). Since the service's domain names couldn't be matched with server IP addresses, the DynamoDb service itself could not be reached. Any apps or services that rely on DynamoDb would then experience intermittent connectivity issues or even complete outages.

Hundreds of companies have likely been affected worldwide. Some notable examples include:

In a statement, the company said: “All AWS Services returned to normal operations at 3:00pm. Some services such as AWS Config, Redshift, and Connect continue to have a backlog of messages that they will finish processing over the next few hours.”

Will this happen again?

This is not the first large-scale AWS service disruption. More recently outages occurred in 2021 and 2023 which left customers unable to access airline tickets and payment apps. And this will undoubtedly not be the last.

Most of the Internet is serviced by a handful of cloud providers which offer scalability, flexibility, and cost savings for businesses around the world. Amazon provides these services for close to 30% of the Internet. So when it comes to the reality that future updates can fail or break key infrastructure, the best that these service providers can do is ensure customer data integrity and have a solid remediation and failover process.

Want to know more?

There's usually more to the story so if you have questions or comments about this post let us know!

Do you need a new software development partner for an upcoming project? We would love to work with you! From websites and mobile apps to cloud services and custom software, we can help!