Amazon AWS Identifies Root Cause Of Widespread Internet Outage Affecting US-East Services

Tyler Durden 2025.10.20 2 min read

Update (0615ET):

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has largely restored operations after a major disruption in its US-East-1 (Northern Virginia) region earlier this morning that affected numerous apps and websites relying on the service.

Root Cause Identified:

AWS engineers traced the issue to a DNS resolution problem affecting the DynamoDB API endpoint in the US-East-1 region. The failure also disrupted other AWS services and global features dependent on that region, including IAM updates and DynamoDB Global Tables.

Timeline of Recovery:

2:01 AM PDT: Engineers identified the DNS issue and began applying fixes.
2:22 AM PDT: Early signs of recovery appeared after initial mitigations, though many requests were still failing.
2:27 AM PDT: AWS reported significant progress, with most requests beginning to succeed.
3:03 AM PDT: AWS confirmed broad recovery across most affected services, including global systems relying on US-East-1, though teams continue working toward full resolution.

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A massive internet outage is being reported at the start of the new workweek. The problem appears to be originating from Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides infrastructure that powers much of the modern internet.

AWS’ Service Health Dashboard shows “operational issues” in its US-East-1 region (Northern Virginia), one of its largest data centers.

What’s happening:

Several AWS services, including DynamoDB and others, are experiencing slow performance (high latency) or failures (high error rates).

Impact:

Apps and websites that rely on AWS may be loading slowly, timing out, or not working at all.
Users may be unable to create or update support cases through AWS’ help system.
Widespread slowdowns and outages are being reported across major platforms that depend on Amazon’s cloud, including Snapchat, Roblox, Amazon Alexa, Fortnite, Ring, Robinhood, Venmo, Lyft, and many others.