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A DNS failure affecting Amazon DynamoDB in AWS’s Northern Virginia US-EAST-1 Region triggered a wider disruption on October 19–20, 2025. AWS repaired the endpoint before every dependent system had recovered, so problems with launches, load balancing and service backlogs continued after the initial fault was addressed. Contemporary reports also named Fortnite and Snapchat among services whose users reported trouble, while Canva reported website errors.
When did the AWS outage happen?
AWS’s post-event summary says the incident began at 11:48 p.m. PDT on October 19, 2025, and ended at 2:20 p.m. PDT on October 20. In a separate public update, AWS said all its services had returned to normal operations by 3:01 p.m. PDT on October 20. Those are two different milestones: the postmortem’s incident window and AWS’s later statement about overall service normalization.
The failure was centered in US-EAST-1, AWS’s Northern Virginia Region. Reported effects reached online services and users in multiple parts of the world, but that does not mean every AWS Region or service failed in the same way.
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What caused the AWS outage?
AWS identified a latent race condition in the automated DNS management system for DynamoDB. The condition produced an incorrect empty DNS record. The automation then deleted the previous DNS plan, leaving the regional DynamoDB endpoint without IP addresses and in a state the system could not repair automatically. Operators had to intervene.
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DNS helps systems find the network address for a service. When customers or AWS systems could not resolve the affected DynamoDB endpoint, they could not establish new connections to it. AWS restored DNS information, and customers were able to resolve the endpoint and connect as cached DNS records expired.
AWS said customers using DynamoDB global tables could still connect to replica tables in other Regions. Replication to and from replicas in affected US-EAST-1, however, lagged during the incident.
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Why did recovery continue after DynamoDB DNS was repaired?
Restoring the endpoint removed the initial obstacle, but systems that depended on DynamoDB still had to recover from interrupted workflows, backlogs and network changes. AWS’s post-event summary describes several distinct stages:
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|---|---|---|
| DynamoDB DNS | The regional endpoint was left without IP addresses after the incorrect empty record and deletion of the older plan. | Operators restored DNS information; resolution and connections returned as cached records expired. |
| EC2 capacity and launches | EC2 management workflows relied on DynamoDB. Leases for existing host capacity expired, making hosts unavailable for new launches until leases could be re-established. Existing EC2 instances launched before the event remained healthy. | AWS throttled incoming work and restarted selected workflow-manager hosts to clear backlogs. New launches then faced further delays while network state propagated. |
| Network Load Balancer (NLB) | Network state propagation lagged. Health checks for newly added instances could fail before network configuration had fully propagated, causing some load-balancer nodes or targets to be removed from DNS. | Some nodes or targets returned after later successful checks. Disabling automatic health-check failover helped restore available capacity; AWS re-enabled it after recovery. |
| Other dependent services | AWS reported effects involving Lambda, SQS event processing, ECS, EKS, Fargate, Amazon Connect, STS, Redshift, the management console and support-case access, among others. Some effects were indirect or lasted beyond the DynamoDB endpoint recovery. | These services had their own recovery timelines; AWS’s account does not describe them as one simultaneous failure with one shared repair. |
Why were Fortnite, Canva and Snapchat affected?
The Washington Post’s October 20 coverage said Fortnite and Snapchat users were among those reporting problems and that Canva reported website errors. The Associated Press also named Fortnite and Snapchat among services for which users reported trouble. These accounts establish that problems were reported during the AWS disruption; they do not establish that every individual report was caused by AWS.
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The reporting cited here does not document each company’s precise AWS architecture or prove a single direct path from the DynamoDB DNS failure to each app’s symptoms. It is therefore more accurate to say that users reported trouble with Fortnite and Snapchat, and that Canva reported errors during the outage, than to claim AWS confirmed the exact dependency for each service.
How many services and users reported problems?
The Associated Press reported that Downdetector received more than 11 million user reports of problems at over 2,500 companies in 2025 during the event. Those are reports, not a verified count of unique people affected or proof that every company’s reported issue originated in AWS.
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AP also reported that AWS said 64 internal AWS services were affected. That figure refers to internal AWS services, not 64 consumer apps or 64 AWS Regions.
What did AWS say it would change?
AWS said it had disabled its DynamoDB DNS Planner and Enactor automation worldwide while preparing fixes for the race condition and protections against incorrect plans. It also described planned safeguards related to NLB capacity removal and EC2 recovery and throttling. AWS presented these as changes it planned to make; the post-event account does not establish that all of them were already completed.
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Oli Buckley, a professor of cybersecurity at Loughborough University, told The Washington Post: “This outage is extremely significant because AWS is a backbone for much of the internet’s infrastructure.” That context helps explain why a fault in one AWS Region can coincide with reports of trouble at unrelated online services, while the underlying cause and recovery path can differ from service to service.
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