Massive Amazon outage takes down Venmo, Snapchat, Alexa, Reddit and much of the internet

[usonian]

Last edited Mon Oct 20, 2025, 01:35 PM - Edit history (1)

Put all your eggs in Amazon's basket?

https://www.techradar.com/news/live/amazon-web-services-alexa-ring-snapchat-fortnite-down-october-2025

A huge Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage has taken out multiple web services including Alexa, Ring, Reddit, Snapchat, Wordle and many more.

The issues appeared to start at around 2.40am ET / 7.40am BST when a large spike on Downdetector showed reported problems with Amazon Web Services – which in turn has taken down many services that rely on its cloud computing power.

The exact cause of the issues isn't clear, but the Amazon Web Services dashboard showed an "operational issue" in North Virginia. The AWS dashboard says "engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue" and recently posted that "we are seeing significant signs of recovery".

The knock-on effects appear to be widespread, including many banks – you can follow all of the latest updates here in this liveblog...

Providing that the liveblog remains up!

"The Internet's having a Monday"



Edit to add an explainer:

A *LOT* of people and businesses rely on Amazon Web Services either for compute power (meaning their sites are hosted there) or for data storage. TONS of data storage. So, they are totally dependent on the nearest Amazon data center to operate. Amazon makes a great deal of its revenue from AWS. And Google does similarly.

As a side note, a lot of users do NOT properly password protect their data, which accounts for many database leaks.

I left out Microsoft, another web services provider, and victim of many hacks. Love them Microsoft coders!

[Ocelot II]

1. I noticed it at about 2:30 this morning when I told Alexa to turn on a light

and nothing happened. Seems OK now.

[Bmoboy]

2. Amazon delivery tracking is down 1 pm EST

[ProfessorGAC]

3. Not Sure If It's Related, But...

...it took 20 minutes & 4 tries to get the system to accept my dispensary order.
Everything worked fine until it got to the financial side, even though I'm paying by debit card when I get there.
Like I said; not sure if it's related but the timing sure seems suspicious.

[imanamerican63]

4. Is "Truth Social" affected by the outage?

I hope so!

[mucholderthandirt]

5. People have been reporting issues with the KDP system (for self publishing) for a while now.

Saw something on my FB feed early this morning that it was down and not accessible at all. Amazon has been saying basically there's nothing wrong for weeks, with reports not matching what people were seeing in their account access. I figured it was just the usual "we've adjusted something and royally screwed it all up" excuse, but maybe there was something worse going on.

[Vinca]

6. I was trying to get on IMDB and discovered that's kaput.

[doc03]

7. That explains it, Alexa won't respond today.

I asked for the weather several times no response. I asked for the spot on gold she answered about a minute later. I asked her to play music nothing.

[MineralMan]

8. And that is why I do not rely on any cloud services for anything I create

on my PC. Everything is stored locally and backed up on USB thumb drives. Microsoft hates that, and wants everything to be saved in its cloud. Why would I do that, since I have zero control over anything stored there.

Just don't rely on cloud data for anything created by you on a desktop, laptop, or phone. Save it to something you can control and back it all up locally.

[Initech]

9. Today's outage is showing just how dangerous monopolies are.

One company goes, down, it affects literally everybody!

[BlueKota]

10. We had problems in our area with the electricity

going out, that came back on, but on a local community chat, people were saying the local Walmarts' computers weren't coming back on line. So they had to close.