AWS Outage - October 2025
Late to the party? That's alright! In a time-span spanning across October 19th and October 20th of this year, 2025, Amazon experienced a partial outage via their AWS platform. To be specific, the outage occurred within their region "US-East-1".
This outage knocked out, for some, various parts of the internet, services, and platforms. Amazon themselves saw application failures, Alexa issues, and even security products like the Ring Doorbell dropped out during said time... of course, only for those that were connecting to US-East-1 infrastructure.
What Had Happen Was...
Now - Amazon has released an entire timeline of events on Amazon's AWS Event Messages page - as well as a more condensed summary on the About Amazon news page.
Amazon states that the problem originates from DNS problems with their DynamoDB service:
... we determined that the event was the result of DNS resolution issues for the regional DynamoDB service endpoints, and mitigated the issue by 2:24 AM PDT. After resolving the DynamoDB DNS issue, AWS services began recovering, but a small subset of internal subsystems continued to be impaired.
- Amazon Staff
While some have pointed out that this doesn't really explain exactly what the DNS issue was and what specifically caused it - it's important to remember that it's ideal to not give too much information away as that information could expose other vulnerabilities and potentially bringing unwanted attention.
What We Can Learn From This
Well, learn again, and again, and again, and again...
We've talked about this in the past - but one, simply just one, region of AWS having issues caused a decent amount of issues for a lot of services, platforms, tools, and apps. This is due to a large portion of the internet being herded under a handful of "land" handled by a handful of entities.
For example, CloudFlare is often referenced when discussing internet outages - because, according to W3Tech: roughly 20% of the internet traffic is routed through CloudFlare services.
In the past, when CloudFlare dealt with outages, we saw similar - if not bigger - disruptions and interruptions. It's becoming ever clearer that large companies are trying to be the biggest actors of the internet. I can only hope that reoccurring situations like these leads to companies and individuals spreading out and giving smaller providers a chance just to gain a bit more stability over the web.
Only time will tell - I do wish Amazon, specifically AWS, the best though; While I may have some personal biases against the company, I can at least say that AWS has provided solid assistance and aid to many platforms and services which in turn keeps a lot of non-Amazon related projects going.
Amazon Staff
- Zane Blalock
