AWS outage explained: Why half the internet went down while you slept

The Internet started the week the way many of us often want to: by refusing to go to work. An Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage left large portions of the internet unavailable Monday morning, with sites and services including Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo, PlayStation Network, and, as expected, Amazon unavailable for a short period of time.

AWS is a cloud services provider owned by Amazon that powers large parts of the Internet. As with the Fastly and Crowdstrike outages over the past few years, the AWS outage shows how much the Internet relies on the same infrastructure — and how quickly our access to the sites and services we rely on is revoked when something goes wrong.

Just after midnight PT on October 20, AWS first recorded an issue on its site Service status pageSaying it is “investigating the increased error rates and response times for multiple AWS services in the US-East-1 region.” At around 2 a.m. PT, it said it had identified the likely root cause of the problem, and within half an hour, it began implementing mitigation measures that led to significant signs of recovery.

“The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS service operations are now succeeding normally,” AWS said at 3:35 a.m. PT. The company did not respond to a request for further comment other than to return us to the AWS Health Dashboard.

At a time when AWS says it first started noticing error rates, Downdetector saw reports starting to rise across several online services, including banks, airlines and phone companies. While AWS has resolved the issue, some of these reports have seen a decrease, while others have not yet returned to normal. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)

At around 4 a.m. PT, Reddit was still down, while services including Verizon and YouTube were still seeing a large number of reported issues.