Amazon Reveals Technical Fault Behind Widescale AWS Service Outage

Amazon Web Services experienced a major outage that affected millions of customers and Amazon’s own operations on October 19 and 20, 2025.

The company has now confirmed that a DNS resolution issue with regional DynamoDB service endpoints was the root cause of the disruption, which lasted approximately two hours and thirty-five minutes.

What Went Wrong with DNS

The outage began at 11:49 PM PDT on October 19 and continued until 2:24 AM PDT on October 20.

During this window, AWS services in the US-EAST-1 region experienced significantly increased error rates.

The problem wasn’t widespread infrastructure failure but rather a specific issue with how the system was resolving addresses for DynamoDB endpoints.

DynamoDB is Amazon’s high-performance database service that powers countless applications. When the DNS system couldn’t properly direct requests to these services, it created a cascade of problems throughout the AWS ecosystem.

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