On Monday, October 20, Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported a massive outage that disrupted millions of users and a wide range of internet services, including major platforms such as Facebook, Snapchat, and the McDonald’s app. The outage began shortly after midnight Pacific Time in the US‑East‑1 region, affecting the region’s primary data center in northern Virginia.
AWS identified the root cause as a DNS problem with DynamoDB, the database service that underpins many other AWS applications. The outage was first reported at 12:11 a.m. PDT, and AWS’s status page noted that the issue was impacting multiple services in the US‑East‑1 region. By 3:35 a.m. PDT, AWS announced that the outage had been fully mitigated and most services were returning to normal operation.
The incident caused widespread service disruptions for customers and partners worldwide, with reports of downtime for platforms such as Amazon, Disney+, Lyft, and the New York Times. AWS’s engineers worked to resolve the issue within a few hours, and the company has since confirmed that it is monitoring the situation to prevent recurrence. While the outage highlighted a vulnerability in AWS’s infrastructure, the rapid resolution mitigated long‑term impact on the company’s reputation and customer trust.
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