Amazon Web Services largely recovered from chaotic global web outages

Amazon says that it has mostly fixed an underlying issue behind a major outage that led to widespread connectivity issues for businesses, popular websites, and apps around the world that rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s cloud service.

The company said on Monday that a cloud computing unit at a data centre in northern Virginia had largely contained the impact of the massive internet outage that affected popular apps such as Zoom, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo, Canva, and Wordle, along with government agencies and global businesses.

In an update on its status page, AWS said it had successfully “restored EC2 instance launch throttles to pre-event levels and EC2 launch failures have recovered across all Availability Zones in the US-EAST-1 Regions”.

AWS provides on-demand computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms, causing havoc on the web and for the many companies that rely on its infrastructure to function.

The website of the outage tracker Downdetector stated earlier in the day that it had received more than 11 million reports of connectivity issues around the world since the beginning of the outage, with hundreds of businesses impacted. Some websites and apps, including Snapchat and several Amazon services, experienced renewed issues after appearing to initially recover.

Amazon said that the problem appears to have originated from within the EC2 internal network. The outage does not appear to have been caused by a cyberattack.

EC2 refers to Amazon’s “Elastic Compute Cloud” service, which provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS.

Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint, told the news outlet CNN that the financial toll of the outage has yet to be assessed, but is likely to be extremely high.

“The incident highlights the complexity and fragility of the internet, as well as how much every aspect of our work depends on the internet to work,” Daoudi said.

“The financial impact of this outage will easily reach into the hundreds of billions due to loss in productivity for millions of workers who cannot do their job, plus business operations that are stopped or delayed — from airlines to factories.”

Platforms including AI startup Perplexity, trading app Robinhood, messaging app Signal and crypto exchange Coinbase also reported issues that they said were due to the AWS outage. The Reuters news agency also reported that Uber rival Lyft’s app was down for thousands of users in the US, while many bank customers in the United Kingdom were also reporting outages.

You may have seen reports of issues with Amazon Web Services affecting a number of websites and apps across the UK today. We know this is impacting some of our services right now. We're sorry about this. Please bear with us as we investigate this.

— Bank of Scotland (@BankofScotland) October 20, 2025

AWS is one of the giant cloud computing service providers, competing with Google and Microsoft’s cloud services.

Some analysts have used the outage to draw attention to the high levels of consolidation in the global cloud services market, with AWS accounting for 30 percent and other tech giants such as Microsoft and Google making up 20 percent and 13 percent, respectively.

“These disruptions are not just technical issues, they’re democratic failures. When a single provider goes dark, critical services go offline with it – media outlets become inaccessible, secure communication apps like Signal stop functioning, and the infrastructure that serves our digital society crumbles,” Corinne Cath-Speth, head of digital issues at the free expression group Article 19, said in a statement.

“We urgently need diversification in cloud computing. The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism, and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies.”