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Many of the world’s biggest apps and websites have suddenly stopped working properly.
Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo and Canva were all suffering problems, according to tracking website Down Detector.
The issues began around 8am in the UK, or midnight pacific time.
The problems appear to be related to an issue at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which offers infrastructure that underpins much of the modern internet.
The company was seeing “increased error rates” and delays with “multiple AWS services”, it said on its service status page.
Amazon Web Services provides a host of internet infrastructure services that allow companies to hire computers and servers to run their apps and websites. As such, any problems at AWS can quickly affect much of the rest of the internet, bringing down websites that might have no apparent connection to Amazon itself.
It is now the most popular provider of such cloud services in the world. It made $108 billion last year, and it now accounts for the majority of Amazon’s profits.
AWS internet outage: Key pointsCould the internet have been hacked?
When there’s a big outage of this kind, it’s always tempting to wonder whether it’s the result of a cyber attack. Security experts have long been warning that the infrastructure underpinning the internet – and as a result underpinning much of the world – could be more fragile than we realise, and that it might one day be broken down by hackers.
There is nothing to indicate that this is a cyber attack. Amazon Web Services doesn’t seem to know exactly what the problem is, and there has been nothing explicit to rule it out, but there is no reason to believe yet that it was an intentional hack.
Such hacks are of course on the rise. In recent months we have seen companies such as Jaguar Land Rover brought to a complete standstill by cyber attacks.
But, more often than not, outages of the kind being seen at Amazon Web Services are the result of an error rather than intentional sabotage. They can stem from a misapplied update, a physical problem at a data centre or just a wrong change to an important setting.
Andrew Griffin20 October 2025 10:16
Amazon says it has found a ‘potential root cause’
It’s now been two hours since the problems began. Amazon says that it has found a “potential root cause” of the problem – and so is presumably at least some of the way to fixing it.
In slightly more technical terms, this is what it has to say: “We have identified a potential root cause for error rates for the DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region. Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1.”
(That doesn’t really tell us much either about the precise nature of the problem or when or how it might be fixed.)
Andrew Griffin20 October 2025 10:12
UK banks Lloyds and Halifax stop working
Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland – which are part of the same parent company – are all seeing problems too, according to tracking website Down Detector and user reports. Affected customers say they are unable to get onto their internet banking.
Andrew Griffin20 October 2025 10:01
Amazon Web Services says it is still looking for the cause of the problems
The outage has now been going on for more than 90 minutes. Amazon has posted a range of updates to its status page, but they make clear that it’s still not entirely clear what the problem is.
“Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause,” the latest update reads.
(Amazon)
Andrew Griffin20 October 2025 09:44
Amazon Web Services might be described as the biggest thing on the internet that you’ve never heard of. (But that might not be true, because actually it’s been growing in prominence, and Amazon itself is spending money on advertising it, among other things. Still, it’s a nice line that’s not entirely untrue either.)
AWS powers the internet, offering cloud services and other web infrastructure to companies. It is not alone in doing that – it competes with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, most notably – but it is the biggest in the industry.
It means in short that a company can rent computers, servers and other technologies from Amazon. For the companies, that means access to the infrastructure required to show apps to people without having to build their own data centres; for Amazon, it benefits from economies of scale that allow it to build massive data centres and share out those computing resources as and when they are needed.
AWS officially launched in 2006, though its roots go further back than that. In the 20 years since it has grown rapidly, and now powers much of the internet and is responsible for most of Amazon’s profits.
Andrew Griffin20 October 2025 09:42
The issue at Amazon Web Services appears to be related to a specific facility in northern Virginia. But the problems are affecting users around the world – tracking website Down Detector shows reports from just about everywhere, across the various affected apps.
Andrew Griffin20 October 2025 09:37
Here’s a big list of everything that is showing as having problems on Down Detector. It includes everything from online games (Clash Royale and Roblox) to the UK’s tax authority:
Snapchat, Ring, Roblox, Clash Royale, Life360, My Fitness Pal, Xero, Canva, Amazon, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Music, Prime Video, Clash of Clans, Fortnite, Wordle, Duolingo, Coinbase, HMRC, Vodafone, Playstation, Pokémon Go.
Andrew Griffin20 October 2025 08:47
Amazon says it is experiencing problems
An update has been posted on Amazon’s service status website, which makes clear that it is experiencing problems at its facilities in north Virginia. The issues are affecting Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud, both of which allow companies to rent storage and computers to run their services.
(Amazon Web Services)
Andrew Griffin20 October 2025 08:41
Downdetector suddenly turns red
Downdetector, a website that tracks complaints about websites and web services not working, shows the sudden and widespread nature of the outage.
(Down Detector)
Andrew Griffin20 October 2025 08:38
… to The Independent’s live coverage of an ongoing internet outage that has taken down much of the internet.
Andrew Griffin20 October 2025 08:34