The internet had a rough morning. In the early hours of October 20, Amazon Web Services (AWS) – the backbone of much of the web – went down, taking with it a long list of popular apps and services that millions rely on every day.
For several hours, users around the world couldn’t send Snaps, connect to Fortnite, or even ask Alexa about the weather. Payment app Venmo stalled, Ring doorbells stopped responding, and parts of Amazon.com itself wouldn’t load.
If it felt like a portion of the internet was broken – well, it kind of was.
What Happened
The outage began around 3:11 a.m. Eastern Time, centered in AWS’s US-East-1 region, located in Northern Virginia – one of Amazon’s largest and most critical data hubs. This region alone handles massive amounts of internet traffic, so when something goes wrong there, the effects ripple globally.
Amazon engineers quickly confirmed the issue stemmed from an internal network monitoring fault, not a cyberattack. Essentially, the system that checks on the health of other systems failed – causing widespread connection issues across multiple AWS services, including load balancing and DNS.
Reports flooded tracking sites like Downdetector, showing spikes from across the U.S. and Europe. Thousands of users couldn’t log in, make purchases, or even access the most basic cloud functions.
By mid-morning, Amazon said it had “mitigated the root cause,” and most affected services began to come back online.
Who Was Affected
The list of affected services was long – and it revealed just how deeply AWS is woven into the internet’s infrastructure.
Some of the biggest names hit included:
- Snapchat – users couldn’t send or receive Snaps.
- Fortnite – servers were down, preventing players from logging in or joining online matches.
- Venmo – payments were delayed or failed to process.
- Ring and Alexa – smart home devices went offline, leaving users shouting “Alexa?” into silence.
- Amazon.com – portions of the shopping site itself showed “error” messages.
- Roblox, Coinbase, Duolingo, and even some government and education systems also saw disruptions.
It wasn’t just apps and games – it was finance, e-commerce, entertainment, and communication, all tripping over one another because of a single cloud provider hiccup.
The Bigger Picture
This outage is another wake-up call about how dependent the internet has become on just a handful of cloud providers. AWS, along with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, supports everything from small startups to massive global platforms.
When one region goes dark, it doesn’t just affect Amazon – it affects half the internet.
It’s not the first time either. AWS has had similar issues in 2021 and 2023, both times triggering a digital domino effect across countless websites and apps. And each time, the lesson is the same: the cloud may be powerful, but it’s not infallible.
As one cybersecurity expert put it in The Guardian, “Internet users are at the mercy of too few providers.”
Lessons Learned
For businesses and developers, the AWS blackout is a reminder to design for redundancy and resilience. If your systems depend entirely on one region or one provider, you’re one outage away from being offline.
For users, it’s a reminder that the “cloud” isn’t some magical, untouchable space. It’s still made of servers – real, physical machines that can fail.
And for Amazon? It’s another test of transparency and trust. The company says it will publish a full Post-Event Summary explaining the root cause and how they plan to prevent future incidents.
Final Thoughts
When Alexa doesn’t answer, Fortnite won’t load, and Venmo can’t send cash, it’s easy to feel like the internet is falling apart. But these moments also highlight how interconnected – and fragile – our digital world really is.
AWS will recover, as it always does. But for everyone building online, from indie developers to billion-dollar companies, it’s a good time to ask: what happens when the cloud goes dark?
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