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The major AWS outage behind the claim that “half the internet” went down was on October 20, 2025—not a confirmed worldwide outage today. As of October 8, 2026, the available status information does not verify a new global event. Check the AWS Health Dashboard for the live picture; it showed regional issues in the UAE and Bahrain in updates through September 15, 2026.
Is AWS down today?
A new worldwide AWS outage on October 8, 2026, is not confirmed by the available status information. That does not establish that every AWS service is healthy: the dashboard information retrieved included continuing issues in AWS Middle East (UAE, me-central-1) and Bahrain (me-south-1), with updates through September 15, 2026. Check the live AWS Health Dashboard for current incidents rather than treating the 2025 headline as a real-time alert.
Check your own account for impact
AWS’s public Service Health view provides current and historical service health, while event details show incident timelines and affected services. If you use AWS, also open the AWS Health Dashboard within your account: it can show account-specific events and affected resources that may not be apparent from a general status report. See AWS’s Health Dashboard documentation.
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What happened in the October 20, 2025 AWS outage?
AWS’s post-event summary traced the initiating fault to automated DNS management for the Amazon DynamoDB regional endpoint dynamodb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com in US-EAST-1, the Northern Virginia region. A latent race condition caused the system to generate an incorrect empty DNS record, and the automation did not repair it. Customers and AWS services that needed to establish new connections to DynamoDB through that endpoint could not do so. AWS describes the incident in its post-event summary.
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Why other services were affected
The DNS fault was the start, not the whole chain. After it was addressed, new EC2 instance launches failed. Health-check failures in some Network Load Balancer clusters then caused connection errors. AWS services dependent on DynamoDB, new EC2 launches, Lambda invocation, or Fargate task starts were also affected.
That dependency chain did not mean every workload stopped. AWS distinguished affected APIs and operations from existing workloads that continued running. The incident was concentrated in US-EAST-1 and the services and operations affected by its dependencies; it should not be described as every AWS region or every AWS customer going offline.
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Did the outage really take down half the internet?
“Half the internet” is a headline-style description of the disruption, not a verified measurement of websites, users, or internet traffic. The Associated Press reported that popular services in social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming, and finance were disrupted. AP also reported that AWS counted 64 internal services affected. That figure is a count of AWS services—not a percentage of the internet. See the Associated Press report from October 20, 2025.
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What should UAE and Bahrain AWS customers do?
The regional issues listed in dashboard updates through September 15, 2026, concerned AWS Middle East in the UAE and AWS Bahrain; they are not evidence of a worldwide outage. AWS’s regional advisories recommended that affected customers use disaster-recovery plans and remote backups, and consider alternate regions where those options fit their latency and data-residency requirements. Check the AWS Health Dashboard and account-specific AWS Health events for the latest incident details before changing production workloads.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How can you reduce the impact of a cloud-region outage?
A backup plan is useful only if it addresses the dependencies and constraints that matter to your application. Use these questions to evaluate resilience rather than assuming that simply selecting another region guarantees uninterrupted service:
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- Regional blast radius: Identify which workloads, data, and users depend on one region, and what would remain available if that region or a service within it had problems.
- Shared dependencies: Map dependencies such as DNS, databases, compute launches, and load-balancer health checks. A failure in one shared component can affect services built on top of it.
- Backup location and restoreability: Confirm that backups are remote from the systems they protect and that your team can restore them—not merely that backup jobs report success.
- Failover time: Define the recovery time your service needs and test failover and restoration against it. An alternate region that has never been exercised is not proof of rapid recovery.
- Operational constraints: Weigh alternate-region plans against latency, data-residency obligations, and other requirements that may limit where data or workloads can run.
AWS’s incident summary and regional advisories show why dependencies, remote backups, and recovery plans matter; they do not establish that any particular architecture can guarantee uninterrupted service.
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