AWS Outage Knocks Out Amazon, Fortnite, and Other Popular Services
AmazonTuesday, 21 October 2025 at 16:41
A major outage in Amazon Web Services (AWS) knocked several
major sites offline, including Amazon, Prime Video, and Fortnite. The problem
started in AWS’s US-EAST-1 region, one of the company’s main data centers, and
was later linked to a DNS issue.
Amazon says it’s figured out what went wrong
and is working to get everything back up and running as soon as possible.
Amazon’s Cloud Powerhouse Takes a Hit
When most people think of Amazon,
they picture the online store or Alexa-powered smart devices. But behind the
scenes, Amazon Web Services quietly powers a large portion of the internet.
From gaming servers to streaming platforms, AWS provides the cloud infrastructure
that keeps many of the world’s most popular sites running.
That’s why, if you noticed trouble
accessing Amazon, Prime Video, Fortnite, or even the AI platform Perplexity, it
wasn’t your connection. The cause was a major AWS crash that rippled through
countless online services overnight.
Amazon's response
According
to the AWS Service Health Dashboard, the issue first appeared around 12:11 AM
PDT on October 20.
At the time, Amazon reported, “We are investigating
increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1
Region.”
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About two hours later, at 2:01 AM
PDT, the company shared more details. Engineers had pinpointed the problem to a
DNS resolution failure linked to the DynamoDB API in the affected region.
“We
have identified a potential root cause,” the update read. “We are working on
multiple paths to accelerate recovery.”
Amazon also confirmed that other AWS
tools relying on the same endpoints, like IAM updates and DynamoDB Global
Tables, were experiencing related problems. Some users even faced issues
submitting support tickets during the downtime.
Impact Across the Web
The
outage quickly spread beyond Amazon’s own services. Major online platforms,
including Fortnite, Clash of Clans, Roblox, Canva, Hulu, Snapchat, Robinhood,
and Palworld, all reported connectivity issues. Smaller websites dependent on
AWS likely experienced interruptions as well.
As of this writing, many systems are back online, though others remain unstable. Amazon has not given a
specific timeline for full recovery but says it is continuing to monitor the
situation closely.
What Users Can Do
For now, there isn’t much users can
do besides wait. If your favorite app or website isn’t loading, it’s likely
connected to the ongoing AWS problem rather than your own internet. Amazon says
it will keep updating customers as progress continues. Hopefully, services will
be back to normal soon.
Summary
- Major AWS outage disrupted Amazon, Prime Video, and Fortnite.
- Issue began in the US-EAST-1 data center.
- Root cause traced to a DNS resolution failure.
- DynamoDB and related AWS tools were also affected.
- Some users couldn’t submit support tickets.
- Platforms like Roblox, Canva, and Hulu went down.
- Smaller AWS-dependent sites saw widespread outages.
- Systems are slowly coming back online.
- No confirmed timeline for full recovery yet.
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