What just happened? A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage has taken down major online services across many parts of the world, including Amazon, Alexa, Ring, Snapchat, Reddit, Fortnite, ChatGPT, and Epic Games Store. The tech giant says that many of the services have now recovered, though some users continue to experience problems.
The issues first started appearing around 12:11 AM PDT, when reports of increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region began flooding in, according to the AWS status checker.
Amazon later confirmed that the problem appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1. The company said global services or features that rely on US-EAST-1 endpoints, such as IAM updates and DynamoDB Global tables, may also be experiencing issues, adding that it was working on speeding up recovery.
A huge number of apps, services, and tools were impacted by the outage. Reports appeared on Reddit of Alexa being unable to answer questions or perform functions – even pre-set alarms were failing to work. Reddit itself was proving difficult to log into for many users.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said on X that the company's AI tool was down. There were also issues with Slack, Duolingo, Sonos, Snapchat, Ring, Robinhood, Max, Venmo, Lyft, Hulu, Disney+, Roku, Signal, Zoom, and Chime.
Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We're working on resolving it.
– Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) October 20, 2025
Gamers have experienced problems with Fortnite logins. Users of Steam, Epic Games Store, Roblox, Pokémon Go, PlayStation Network, and others have also been suffering as a result of the AWS crash.
At 3:35 AM PDT, Amazon wrote that the underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally. It noted that some requests may be throttled as it works toward a full resolution.
For anyone still experiencing an issue resolving the DynamoDB service endpoints in US-EAST-1, flushing the DNS caches is recommended.
Whenever we see major cyber incidents like this one in which multiple services are affected, the first concern is whether it's a cyberattack. WannaCry, NotPetya and the SolarWinds supply chain attack are still remembered by many. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine and rising tensions with China, the risk of such attacks coming from a nation state is higher these days. Thankfully, this was just an error on AWS' part, though the company is unlikely to be relieved.
Massive AWS outage takes down dozens of services, including Alexa, Reddit, and Fortnite
