On Monday, October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cornerstone of global internet infrastructure, experienced a significant outage that disrupted numerous widely-used websites and applications worldwide.
The disruption originated in AWS’s US-East-1 data center located in Virginia, triggered by a DNS resolution malfunction impacting the DynamoDB API endpoint. This failure cascaded through various services hosted in that region, causing extensive interruptions.
High-profile platforms such as Snapchat, Canva, Fortnite, Robinhood, and Perplexity AI were among those affected by the downtime.
Even Amazon’s proprietary services, including Alexa and Prime Video, faced issues. Users globally reported difficulties logging in, unresponsive applications, and missing functionalities. Downdetector, a real-time outage monitoring site, recorded thousands of incident reports within the first hour of the outage.
AWS confirmed that their engineering teams were tackling the problem through “multiple simultaneous approaches” and later announced the issue had been “completely resolved.” Nonetheless, some services continued to experience delays as queued requests were processed.
This incident highlights AWS’s pivotal role in the digital landscape. As industries spanning finance, entertainment, retail, and artificial intelligence increasingly depend on cloud infrastructure, the vulnerabilities of centralized systems become more apparent.
Impact on African Startups Amid the AWS Outage
According to Downdetector, the outage was confined to the US-East-1 region, yet some Snapchat users in Nigeria reported service interruptions. At the time of writing, no African enterprises have officially reported outages linked to this event.
While AWS is known for its robust regional availability, this episode demonstrates how a fault in a critical zone can trigger widespread service failures.
For African startups and businesses relying on US-based cloud infrastructure, this outage underscores the importance of implementing backup solutions and diversifying hosting environments to mitigate risks.
Telecommunications companies like MTN and Airtel have proactively positioned themselves as alternatives to global cloud providers by developing Tier 3 and Tier 4 data centers in Lagos, Nigeria, aiming to reduce dependency on foreign hyper-scale cloud services.
As of now, AWS has not released comprehensive technical details about the root cause or outlined specific measures to prevent similar incidents in the future.