Amazon AWS Cloud Outage Disrupts Snapchat, Signal, Ring, Roblox Access/ Newslooks/ WASHINGTON/ J. Mansour/ Morning Edition/ A global Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage early Monday disrupted major platforms including Snapchat, Ring, Signal, and popular games like Roblox and Fortnite. The issue stemmed from AWS’s domain name system in the US-EAST-1 region. Most services recovered within hours, but the event highlights growing risks tied to centralized cloud infrastructure.
Amazon Web Services Outage Quick Looks
- AWS outage triggered disruptions across global online services
- Affected apps included Snapchat, Fortnite, Signal, and Roblox
- Ring, Alexa, and Amazon.com also experienced downtime
- Coinbase, Robinhood, and McDonald’s app were among impacted platforms
- Issue traced to DNS problems in AWS US-EAST-1 region
- Began around 3:11 a.m. ET and saw recovery by 6:30 a.m.
- Over 64 internal AWS services were affected
- Experts stress overreliance on big cloud providers like AWS
- No evidence of cyberattack—considered a technical issue
- AWS says services now operating normally after resolution steps
Deep Look: AWS Cloud Outage Disrupts Snapchat, Ring, Signal and More
LONDON (Oct. 20, 2025) — A widespread outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday morning left millions of users unable to access major online platforms including Snapchat, Ring, Signal, and popular games like Roblox and Fortnite. The three-hour disruption also impacted financial platforms, smart home devices, and even Amazon’s own services, raising fresh concerns about the vulnerability of the internet’s cloud infrastructure.
Amazon attributed the disruption to a technical issue within its domain name system (DNS) — a critical part of internet architecture that translates web addresses into IP addresses, allowing websites and apps to load correctly on devices.
The outage began around 3:11 a.m. Eastern Time, with AWS reporting “increased error rates and latencies” across multiple services in its US-EAST-1 region, which supports many global applications. As user complaints flooded in, AWS confirmed “significant error rates” and said engineers were working urgently to resolve the issue.
By 6:30 a.m. ET, Amazon reported that “most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally” and that both domestic and global features tied to the affected region had largely recovered.
Wide-Ranging Impact
Reports on DownDetector, a real-time outage tracker, indicated problems with a variety of high-traffic applications and platforms:
- Snapchat: Users couldn’t send or receive messages
- Roblox & Fortnite: Players faced login errors and game crashes
- Signal: Messaging services were intermittently inaccessible
- Robinhood: Users reported issues with trading functions
- Coinbase: Experienced platform connectivity issues
- McDonald’s App: Food orders were disrupted
- Amazon Ring & Alexa Devices: Malfunctioned or became unresponsive
- Kindle: Users were unable to download books or sync content
Notably, Amazon.com itself and many of its own internal services were also affected, reinforcing how central AWS has become to modern digital life.
Recurring Infrastructure Vulnerabilities
This isn’t the first time AWS has experienced a widespread failure. Major outages also occurred in 2023, 2021, 2020, and 2017. The 2021 incident, the longest in recent years, lasted over five hours and crippled everything from airline bookings to payment systems.
In Monday’s case, 64 internal AWS services were affected, including those tied to data storage, computing power, and content delivery. Though the root issue was not tied to a cyberattack, the cascading impact again exposed just how fragile the digital ecosystem can be when concentrated in a handful of tech giants.
Experts Warn of Over-Reliance
Cybersecurity expert Patrick Burgess of the BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT in the UK, warned that the dependency on a few cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft means that single points of failure can trigger global consequences.
“So much of the world now relies on these three or four big compute companies… when there’s an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad spectrum of services,” said Burgess.
He emphasized that for most users, the infrastructure behind their favorite apps is invisible. “We don’t see Amazon. We just see Snapchat, or Roblox, or Alexa not working,” he said.
While outages like these are typically resolved within hours rather than days, they are a stark reminder that cloud infrastructure has become as essential—and as potentially vulnerable—as utilities like electricity and water.
No Indication of Cyberattack
Fortunately, cybersecurity analysts and AWS confirmed that the issue was not the result of a cyberattack or malicious breach. Instead, it appears to have been a technical misconfiguration or failure within AWS’s DNS systems.
“This looks like a good old-fashioned technology issue—something’s gone wrong and it will be fixed by Amazon,” said Burgess. “These companies have well-established processes for managing this kind of incident.”
Cloud Dependency on the Rise
As more businesses, governments, and consumers rely on digital services for everything from communication and finance to entertainment and logistics, cloud infrastructure failures have become increasingly disruptive. AWS powers millions of services globally, making even minor system problems far-reaching.
The temporary outage affected services spanning social media, gaming, home security, e-commerce, and finance, underscoring how even a short downtime window can ripple through daily life and commerce.
With cloud computing now underpinning the global internet economy, experts say these incidents should serve as a call to action for diversified infrastructure planning, better failover systems, and greater transparency from providers.
You must Register or Login to post a comment.