Amazon’s cloud services unit AWS has said that it had fixed an underlying issue that caused a major outage and led to widespread connectivity issues for businesses, popular websites, and apps around the world.
But some customers continued on Monday to face difficulties using services that rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
In an update on its status page, AWS said it continued to “observe recovery across all AWS services” but that some customers could continue to face issues after the major global internet disruption, which hit big names like Zoom, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo, Canva, and Wordle.
The website of the outage tracker Downdetector showed that many apps and websites such as Reddit and Xfinity have stabilised, but Downdetector said it had received more than 11 million reports of connectivity issues around the world since the beginning of the outage, with hundreds of businesses impacted.
Some websites and apps, including Amazon services, experienced renewed issues after appearing to initially recover earlier in the day.
AWS provides on-demand computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms that rely on its cloud infrastructure.
Amazon said that the problem appears to have originated from within the EC2 internal network. The outage does not appear to have been caused by a cyberattack.
Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint, told the news outlet CNN that the financial toll of the outage has yet to be assessed, but is likely to be extremely high.
“The incident highlights the complexity and fragility of the internet, as well as how much every aspect of our work depends on the internet to work,” Daoudi said.
“The financial impact of this outage will easily reach into the hundreds of billions due to loss in productivity for millions of workers who cannot do their job, plus business operations that are stopped or delayed — from airlines to factories.”
Platforms including AI startup Perplexity, trading app Robinhood, messaging app Signal and crypto exchange Coinbase also reported issues that they said were due to the AWS outage.
Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.
— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) October 20, 2025
AWS is one of the giant cloud computing service providers, competing with Google and Microsoft’s cloud services to offer on-demand computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies and institutions.
Issues with its servers can wreak havoc on the web, with so many companies relying on its infrastructure to function.
Some analysts have used the outage to draw attention to the high levels of consolidation in the global cloud services market, with AWS accounting for 30 percent and other tech giants such as Microsoft and Google making up 20 percent and 13 percent, respectively.
“These disruptions are not just technical issues, they’re democratic failures. When a single provider goes dark, critical services go offline with it – media outlets become inaccessible, secure communication apps like Signal stop functioning, and the infrastructure that serves our digital society crumbles,” Corinne Cath-Speth, head of digital issues at the free expression group Article 19, said in a statement.
“We urgently need diversification in cloud computing. The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism, and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies.”
PSA: we are aware that Signal is down for some people. This appears to be related to a major AWS outage. Stand by.
— Meredith Whittaker (@mer__edith) October 20, 2025
Downdetector, a site on which web users report outages, carried a roll call of hundreds of popular sites where users had experienced access difficulties amid the outage.
Amazon’s shopping website, Prime Video and Alexa were also facing issues, according to the site.
The Reuters news agency reported that Uber rival Lyft’s app was also down for thousands of users in the US, while many bank customers in the United Kingdom were also reporting outages.
You may have seen reports of issues with Amazon Web Services affecting a number of websites and apps across the UK today. We know this is impacting some of our services right now. We’re sorry about this. Please bear with us as we investigate this.
— Bank of Scotland (@BankofScotland) October 20, 2025
