The Great Blackout: AWS Outage Cripples Half the Internet

The Great Blackout: AWS Outage Cripples Half the Internet reports that AWS suffered a major outage on Monday morning, 20 October 2025 (Eastern Time), with the disruption concentrated in US-EAST-1 (Northern Virginia) and described as leaving “half the internet” offline for several hours. According to AWS’s Service Health Dashboard, the incident began with rising error rates and latency, and by 5:01 a.m. the root cause was identified as a DNS resolution failure affecting DynamoDB, a core NoSQL database service.

The outage expanded to EC2, with AWS advising customers not to bind deployments to specific Availability Zones to allow dynamic reallocation to healthier data centres, and by 9:42 a.m. continued elevated error rates persisted despite mitigation efforts. By 10:14 a.m. a substantial backlog of requests remained, and Down Detector data showed a dramatic spike in service failures across numerous platforms, underscoring how many enterprises rely on US-EAST-1 as a core deployment region.

As of mid-2025, AWS commanded roughly 30% of the global cloud infrastructure market, highlighting the systemic risk of heavy reliance on a few mega providers.