10/21/2025

What the Huge AWS Outage Reveals about the Internet

Amazon Web Services' resolution issues knocked down wide swaths of the web

A massive cloud outage stemming from Amazon Web Services' key US-EAST-1 region, its hub in northern Virginia, near the U.S. Capitol, caused widespread disruptions of websites and platforms around the world on Monday morning. Amazon's main ecommerce platform and other properties, including Ring doorbells and the Alexa smart assistant, suffered interruptions and outages throughout the morning, as did Meta's communication platform WhatsApp, OpenAI's ChatGPT, PayPal's Venmo payment platform, multiple web services from Epic Games, multiple British government websites and many others.

The outages stemmed from Amazon's DynamoDB database application programming interfaces in U.S.-EAST-1, and AWS said in status updates the problem was specifically related to DNS resolution issues.

The “domain name system” is a foundational internet service that essentially acts as an automatic phonebook lookup to translate web URLs like www.wired.com into numeric server IP addresses so web browsers show users the right content. DNS resolution issues occur when DNS servers aren't accurately connecting these dots and, to keep with the phonebook analogy, are providing the wrong numbers for a given name or vice versa.

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.