Amazon Reveals Technical Fault Behind Widescale AWS Service Outage
Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant outage impacting millions of customers and Amazon's operations on Thu, Oct 19, 2025, and Fri, Oct 20, 2025.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant outage impacting millions of customers and Amazon's operations on Thu, Oct 19, 2025, and Fri, Oct 20, 2025.
The disruption was caused by a DNS resolution issue with regional DynamoDB service endpoints, lasting approximately two hours and thirty-five minutes. AWS has confirmed the issue and provided detailed information about the incident.
The outage commenced at 11:49 PM PDT on Thu, Oct 19, 2025, and continued until 2:24 AM PDT on Fri, Oct 20, 2025. During this period, AWS services in the US-EAST-1 region experienced significantly increased error rates.
The issue was not an extensive infrastructure failure but was specific to how DNS was resolving addresses for DynamoDB endpoints. DynamoDB is Amazon's high-performance database service critical to numerous applications. The DNS resolution failure caused widespread issues within the AWS ecosystem, affecting Amazon.com and various subsidiary operations.
The disruption was caused by a DNS resolution issue with regional DynamoDB service endpoints, lasting approximately two hours and thirty-five minutes.
AWS engineers identified the DNS problem at 12:26 AM PDT and initiated mitigation efforts. By 2:24 AM PDT, the core DNS issue was resolved, marking the first significant step in recovery. Despite this, some internal subsystems remained affected, necessitating further action.
To stabilize the system, AWS implemented throttling on certain operations, including new EC2 instance launches, to facilitate a smoother recovery. This approach prevented the system from becoming overwhelmed by delaying some requests rather than allowing them to fail.
Substantial recovery progress was evident by 12:28 PM PDT, and throttling was gradually reduced throughout the afternoon. AWS technical teams continued to address remaining issues while continuously monitoring system health. By 3:01 PM PDT on Fri, Oct 20, 2025, all services returned to normal operations.
The entire recovery process, from detection to complete restoration, spanned approximately 15 hours. AWS has published a comprehensive post-event summary detailing the incident, response actions, and preventive measures to avert future occurrences.
Customers experiencing persistent issues are advised to consult the AWS Health Dashboard for real-time updates and further information on any services still facing challenges.
Based on reporting by GBHackers.