Full story: Amazon Web Services outage hits dozens of websites and apps
Dan Milmo
A major internet outage has hit dozens of websites and apps around the world, with users reporting troubles getting online after problems at Amazon’s cloud computing service.
The affected platforms include Snapchat, Roblox, Signal and Duolingo as well as a host of Amazon-owned operations including its main retail site and the Ring doorbell company.
In the UK, Lloyds bank was affected as well as its subsidiaries Halifax and Bank of Scotland, while there were also reports of problems accessing the HM Revenue and Customs website on Monday morning. Also in the UK, multiple Ring users took to social media to complaint their doorbells were not working.
In the UK alone reports of problems on individual apps ran into the tens of thousands for each platform. More here:
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Expert: Why DynamoDB problems caused global outage
We flagged earlier that the disruption at Amazon Web Services involved DynamoDB, one of its core infrastructure services.
Mike Chapple, IT professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, explains why DynamoDB is important, and why its failure has caused so much disruption today:
DynamoDB isn’t a term that most consumers know, but it underpins the apps and services that all of us use every single day. It’s a centralized database service that many Internet-based services use to track user information, store key data, and manage their operations. DynamoDB is one of the record-keepers of the modern Internet. It’s fast, it’s cheap, and it’s reliable.
But today it stopped working and we saw the effects of that outage ripple across the Internet. We’ll learn more in the hours and days ahead but early reports indicate that this wasn’t actually a problem with the database itself. The data appears to be safe. Instead, something went wrong with the records that tell other systems where to find their data. Amazon had the data safely stored, but nobody else could find it for several hours, leaving apps temporarily separated from their data.
It’s as if large portions of the Internet suffered temporary amnesia. This episode serves as a reminder of how dependent the world is on a handful of major cloud service providers: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. When a major cloud provider sneezes, the Internet catches a cold.”
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“It’s always DNS”
Marek Szustak, IT Security Officer at online travel agency eSky Group, isn’t surprised to hear that today’s problems relate to the Domain Name System (effectively the internet’s phonebook).
Szustak explains:
Today’s outage in the AWS US-EAST-1 region shows how even the largest cloud environments can be paralysed by a seemingly minor piece of infrastructure. In this case, the problem concerned DNS, the foundation of network communication. When domain name resolution stops working, entire applications and services can stop responding, no matter how well they are designed.
This is a good lesson for companies using the cloud: it is worth designing systems so that a failure in one region or provider does not bring the entire business to a halt. Redundancy, geographical distribution of resources and testing of emergency scenarios should be the norm, not a luxury.
And besides, as engineers say, it’s always DNS…
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Although services seem to be coming back online, it appears the problem at AWS isn’t fully fixed yet.
In its latest update, the cloud computing operator says:
We are continuing to work towards full recovery for EC2 launch errors, which may manifest as an Insufficient Capacity Error. Additionally, we continue to work toward mitigation for elevated polling delays for Lambda, specifically for Lambda Event Source Mappings for SQS.
We will provide an update by 5:00 AM PDT [that’s 1pm in the UK].
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According to TechRadar, the popular word game Wordle was hit by today’s outage.
Wordle’s working OK now, though* – an indication that the worst of today’s outages may be over, given AWS’s progress in fixing the problem
(* yes I got it, but it took five guesses, so only just…)
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A Lloyds Bank spokesperson has asked customers to ‘bear’ with it, while it works to bring services back online, saying:
“Issues with Amazon Web Services are affecting some of our services right now.
“We’re sorry about this and ask customers to bear with us while we work to bring all our services back online as soon as possible.”
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AWS: The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated
Another update from Amazon Web Services, who report that the underlying issue causing today’s outage has now been “fully mitigated.
In an update timestamped at 3:35 AM PDT (or 11.35am UK time), AWS says:
The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now. Some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution. Additionally, some services are continuing to work through a backlog of events such as Cloudtrail and Lambda.
The DNS, or Domain Name System (DNS) is used to map addresses on the internet, by translating human-readable domain name (such as www.the guardian.com) into numerical IP addresses that can be read by routers to direct traffic across the web.
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Today’s outage does not appear to be caused by a cyber-attack, reports Dr Amro Al-Said Ahmad, a lecturer in computer science at Keele University, who explains:
The issue appears to be related to AWS (Amazon Web Services), which hosts the infrastructure that underpins much the internet services. It allows customers to deploy their own servers, databases, and storage without the need to own physical infrastructure.
According to AWS’s latest update, they have identified the root cause of the outage. It appears to be significant error rates for requests made to their data storage service, DynamoDB, in the US-EAST region. Therefore, the outage was not caused by cyber-related attacks, as was speculated.
Resolving major outages like this presents significant challenges because of the cloud complexity and its dependencies. Furthermore, diagnoses need to see how much third-party platforms are dependent on AWS cloud. The solution and fix will involve thorough diagnostics, testing, and deployment of a reliable fix, which, based on past incidents in the industry, can take anywhere from hours to several days.
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UK ‘in contact’ over Amazon Web Services incident
Dan Milmo
The UK government has said it is in contact with Amazon over today’s internet outage.
A government spokesperson says:
“We are aware of an incident affecting Amazon Web Services, and several online services which rely on their infrastructure. Through our established incident response arrangements, we are in contact with the company, who are working to restore services as quickly as possible.”
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Full story: Amazon Web Services outage hits dozens of websites and apps
Dan Milmo
A major internet outage has hit dozens of websites and apps around the world, with users reporting troubles getting online after problems at Amazon’s cloud computing service.
The affected platforms include Snapchat, Roblox, Signal and Duolingo as well as a host of Amazon-owned operations including its main retail site and the Ring doorbell company.
In the UK, Lloyds bank was affected as well as its subsidiaries Halifax and Bank of Scotland, while there were also reports of problems accessing the HM Revenue and Customs website on Monday morning. Also in the UK, multiple Ring users took to social media to complaint their doorbells were not working.
In the UK alone reports of problems on individual apps ran into the tens of thousands for each platform. More here:
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The AFP newswire points out that there have also been reports of disruption at Amazon Prime, Alexa, Reddit, various video streaming platforms such as Hulu and Disney+, as well as messaging app Signal and Delta Air Lines, as well as the services we’ve flagged in this blog already.
They also cite Downdetector data showing reports of disruption at Whatsapp (although mine has been working OK this morning) and Tinder (can’t help with this one, sorry).
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AWS: global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered.
Amazon Web Services has now suggested that the recovery from today’s outage at its US-EAST-1 region in Virginia is on track.
Its operational status page now says:
We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS Services.
We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered. We continue to work towards full resolution and will provide updates as we have more information to share.
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HMRC: We’re hit by global issues affecting Amazon Web Services
A spokesperson for HMRC, the UK tax authority, has confirmed that its online service has been disrupted by the problem at Amazon Web Services.
An HMRC spokesperson said:
“We’re aware that customers are having problems accessing our online services, as part of global issues affecting Amazon Web Services. We’re working urgently with them on this matter.
“Our phonelines are currently busy as a result, so for anything that isn’t urgent we recommend calling at a later time.”
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AI startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood have all attributed outages today to AWS, Reuters reports.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said in a post on X:
“Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.”
Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.
— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) October 20, 2025
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The technical problem at Amazon Web Services looks like “an IT issue on the database side,” reports Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at security firm Sophos.
Pilling explains:
“When anything like this happens the concern that it’s a cyber incident is understandable. AWS has a far reaching and intricate footprint, so any issue can cause a major upset. In this case it looks like it is an IT issue on the database side and they will be working to remedy it as an absolute priority.”
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AWS: We are seeing significant signs of recovery
Just in: Amazon Web Services report that they are seeing “significant signs of recovery” in the operational issue that appears to have disrupted services across the internet today.
In an operational update, AWS says:
We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests. We will continue to provide additional information.
That follows an earlier update announcing that some ‘early signs of recovery’ were being detected, with AWS saying:
We have applied initial mitigations and we are observing early signs of recovery for some impacted AWS Services. During this time, requests may continue to fail as we work toward full resolution. We recommend customers retry failed requests. While requests begin succeeding, there may be additional latency and some services will have a backlog of work to work through, which may take additional time to fully process.
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Update: Duolingo streaks should still be safe despite the technical problems hitting the site today.
One user received this ‘quick maintainance break!’ page, which reassures users that their streak is protected today ‘just in case!’.
Duolingo’s maintainance break page Photograph: DuolingoShare
Problems are also being reported at Depop, the secondhand clothing platform.
According to the Down for Everyone or Just Me site, problems have been reported by users in Australia, New Zealand, the US and the UK, highlighting how today’s outage is a global problem.
A chart showing problems reported at Depop Photograph: https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/Share
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