Global Internet Outage: Amazon Web Services Disrupts Major Websites and Apps

Global Internet Outage: Amazon Web Services Disrupts Major Websites and Apps

On October 20, 2025, AWS suffered a catastrophic failure that resulted in hundreds of thousands of websites and applications going dark for people across the globe. This disruption led to widespread outages for users attempting to access a myriad of online services. The act set off a cascade that affected all sectors. The impact to major platforms like Amazon Prime, Alexa, Reddit, and large video streaming platforms such as Hulu and Disney+ were widespread. Privacy-focused messaging app Signal was brought to its knees by the outage.

The outage sent alarm bells ringing as users took to social media to express how they were unable to access the internet. All this was made worse by technical failures at airlines like Delta Air Lines, creating a perfect storm of confusion and issues for travelers. Meanwhile, down in the United Kingdom, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) nailed down the reality of disruptions to its online services. This is a testament to the far-reaching impact of the outage. Lloyds Bank, Halifax and Bank of Scotland featured amongst the pawnbrokers, moneylenders and criminals’ favourite financial institutions.

According to AWS, the outage was due to an “operational issue” that had engineers scrambling to restore service. The company took responsibility for the incident in a statement. They have been able to put in place early mitigations and see early evidence of recovery for some impacted services. Though it was a step in the right direction, they warned that users could still face requests failures while the resolution process was ongoing.

“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.” – AWS

This became serious enough for the UK government to get involved, reaching out to Amazon to discuss how the outage could affect the operation of critical services. An HMRC spokesperson stated, “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.”

As far as disruption went, it certainly wasn’t just government services. Even leading digital first platforms, such as Duolingo went to “quick maintenance break.” They will hold up crisis of the AWS outage. Speaking to eWeek, Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at Sophos, pointed out an alarming trend. He noted that cyber incidents tend to increase dramatically during outages of this nature. He further elucidated that due to AWS’s vast setup, even the smallest hiccup could take down near-impossible-to-replace resources and cause widespread outages.

“When anything like this happens the concern that it’s a cyber incident is understandable. 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.” – Rafe Pilling

As users quickly flooded social media to vent their frustrations with the strange connectivity problems, others said they experienced difficulty logging into their most-used streaming apps. For others, even the most basic tasks that needed an internet connection became a challenge.

As the situation unfolded, companies scrambled to communicate with their customers about the disruptions. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas informed users about their service status: “Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.”

The far-reaching nature of the outage emphasizes how interconnected almost all services have gotten in today’s digital world. Today, cloud service providers such as AWS are extremely important infrastructure to the majority of business enterprises. When their experts confront technical challenges, vulnerabilities can start to appear.

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