AWS (Amazon Web Services) Major Outage

Today, millions of people around the world experienced what it’s like when the cloud actually clouds out. The cloud provider AWS had a major outage that affected a huge number of online services — from apps we use every day to systems that businesses rely on.

What Happened

• The outage began in the US-East-1 region (Northern Virginia) of AWS and quickly rippled out into other regions and services.
• AWS posted an update saying there were “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region.
• One specific cause: AWS engineers identified a “potential root cause” — DNS resolution issues of the DynamoDB API endpoint in the US-EAST-1 region.
• The fallout: many apps and services that rely on AWS infrastructure either slowed down significantly, failed to load, or disappeared altogether. Examples: the voice assistant Alexa, chat tools, banking apps, gaming platforms.

Why It Matters

Why should you care (even if you’re not a software engineer)? Here are some reasons:

Everything is interconnected now: Many popular services don’t just live on their own servers. They depend on cloud providers like AWS. When the cloud provider hiccups, the ripple is huge.

Digital lives pause: For many of us, routines like “ask Alexa to turn off the lights” or “log into my bank app” just stopped working.

Business risks grow: For businesses that depend on cloud services, such an outage means lost productivity, frustrated customers, potential revenue loss, and brand damage.

Lessons for resilience: These events are reminders that even the world’s largest cloud provider isn’t immune to problems. Planning for failure (yes, you heard that right) is still important.

Official Service Health Dashboard and Statements from AWS. 

So many businesses are affected. Some to name: 𝐒𝐧𝐚𝐩𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐭, 𝐃𝐮𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐨, 𝐂𝐚𝐧𝐯𝐚, 𝐀𝐭𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐚𝐧, Asana, Slack, 𝐛𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐬 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐠𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐬, 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐬, 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐬, 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐛𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐬