The internet is wobbling again. A major AWS outage in us-east-1 has taken key apps and services offline, from Snapchat and Fortnite to Alexa and Ring. Amazon Web Services confirmed “increased error rates and latencies” affecting multiple services in its US-EAST-1 region in Northern Virginia. The incident began around 8:00 AM UK time on October 20, 2025, which is 12:30 PM IST, and quickly rippled worldwide as customer workloads failed to connect.
In This Article
What went down and when
AWS’s status notices flagged operational issues starting roughly 3:11 AM ET. Consumer-facing apps showed it first. Snapchat users reported login failures and message send errors, while Fortnite players faced “request could not be completed” errors on the Epic Games Store. Smart home routines on Alexa stalled for many households. Several productivity and creator tools were also hit, including Airtable and Canva, alongside the McDonald’s app and other retail and food platforms.
Read Also: 8 ways to fix the C14A error on Snapchat
The outage radius
The scope is broad because AWS is the backbone for thousands of internet services. Business press tallies and outage trackers indicate dozens of AWS tools are degraded, which in turn disrupts platforms that rely on DynamoDB, EC2, and related building blocks. Perplexity’s CEO publicly attributed their downtime to the AWS incident, mirroring what many other teams are seeing in dashboards and logs.
Not just social and games
Reports point to issues across communications, finance, and media, plus login and identity flows that sit in front of many apps. In the UK, some banking access was affected, which underscores how a single cloud region can become a single point of widespread friction when dependencies stack up.
Why us-east-1 matters
US-EAST-1 is one of AWS’s oldest and largest regions. When it stumbles, the impact tends to be loud. Similar region-specific failures in 2020, 2021, and 2023 also had outsized effects, as documented by incident post-mortems and third-party internet telemetry. The lesson is consistent. Architect for regional isolation and failover, or risk collateral downtime when a core region has trouble.
What users can try now?
While AWS engineers work on mitigation, regular users can try a few basics:
-
Reboot apps or devices to refresh DNS and expired sessions.
-
Switch from Wi-Fi to mobile data to bypass stale network paths.
-
For smart home gear, run local controls if available and avoid routine edits until services stabilise.
-
Creators and teams should pause large uploads and time-sensitive publishes until status pages show recovery.
(Recovery windows will vary by service and provider.)
What builders should review?
If your product is affected, confirm health checks and timeouts, verify cross-region replication, and practice runbooks for failover and rollback. Past incidents show that excessive retries can amplify load during partial recovery, so tune exponential backoff and circuit breakers. Keep customer-facing status comms clear and timestamped.
Read Also: Vivo revealed OriginOS 6 rollout timeline: Check out the list
Quick status snapshot
-
Region at issue: US-EAST-1, with global knock-ons
-
Start window: Around 8:00 AM UK, 12:30 PM IST, 3:00 AM ET
-
Notable apps affected: Snapchat, Fortnite, Alexa, Perplexity, Airtable, Canva, Ring and more
-
AWS note: Increased error rates and latency across multiple services, investigation ongoing
Cloud centralisation makes sense for speed and scale, but days like this are a reminder that resilience is a product feature. Multi-region and multi-cloud cost more today. They buy your trust tomorrow.
