When the Internet Stops: the Amazon Web Services Outage and the Hidden Fragility of the Modern Web

On 20 October 2025, at around 8:50 am Italian time (11:48 pm on 19 October on the US Pacific coast), the US-EAST-1 region of Amazon Web Services (AWS), in Virginia, started returning errors. It was one of the most serious outages in recent years: for hours, millions of users around the world were left without access to websites, cloud platforms, payment services and smart devices, including Amazon’s own.

According to the report published by AWS, it all started with the Domain Name System (DNS), the mechanism that translates domain names (for example amazon.com) into the IP addresses that servers use. When DNS does not respond, applications and services can no longer “find” each other on the network.

What caused the AWS outage

The cause was a latent defect in the system that automatically manages DynamoDB’s DNS records. DynamoDB is the NoSQL database that thousands of apps and websites rely on, including many of AWS’s own internal services.

Two DNS update processes ran at the same time: an old plan overwrote the new one, and the automatic clean-up then deleted it. As a result, DynamoDB’s address in the region was left with no DNS record at all, and the system could no longer fix itself. Engineers had to step in manually.

DynamoDB’s DNS was back in order in about three hours, but the damage spread:

• for several hours new EC2 instances could not be launched, the AWS virtual servers;
• the Network Load Balancers, which spread traffic across servers, started failing health checks and returning connection errors.

According to AWS, the disruption ended at 2:20 pm Pacific time, or 11:20 pm in Italy: about 14 and a half hours in total, with three distinct phases of impact.

Which services went offline

The effect was immediate:

• Fortnite, Snapchat, Alexa, Ring, Zoom and Disney+ went offline or suffered significant delays.
• Several banking services and payment apps (including international gateways) saw transactions blocked.
• Smart home platforms too, such as Ring cameras and doorbells, were inaccessible for hours.

In Europe, and to a lesser extent in Italy, the impact was indirect but real: slowdowns, failed logins and synchronisation problems on services that use AWS infrastructure in the United States as their back end.

Why a cloud concentrated in a few providers is a risk

Most of the European cloud market is in the hands of Amazon, Microsoft and Google. This concentration ensures efficiency and performance, but it also creates single points of failure with huge consequences.

Most of the digital services we use every day run over the same backbones, the same data centres and even the same DNS systems. So a defect in one automated system can become a worldwide blackout.

How a business that runs on the cloud can protect itself

The AWS outage is a wake-up call for anyone who depends on a single provider, or a single region.

Businesses that rely on the cloud should consider multi-region or multi-cloud strategies, spreading workloads and data, and disaster recovery plans able to guarantee business continuity even in the event of a total failure. And those plans need to be tested, not just written.

How fragile the global network is

Everyday actions such as paying for a coffee or switching on a smart light bulb depend on invisible, interconnected systems.

The AWS outage in October showed this fragility: a defect in a single automated system, in a single region, disrupted a huge part of the digital infrastructure.

An outage like this can happen again, and it pays to be prepared.