When Amazon coughs, half of the Internet shakes.
Due to the downtime of Amazon AWS servers , a large number of Internet services were forced to be interrupted, and ChatGPT was also affected.
The failure occurred in the us-east-1 region in the eastern United States, which is the core of AWS's global services.
According to data from the fault tracking platform Downdetector, more than 6.5 million user fault reports were received on that day.
Non-exhaustive list
This AWS incident also caused the services of social platforms including Reddit to crash, and people were almost unable to even complain.
Moreover, even AWS’s own customer support ticket system was down, and there was no way to report an error.
Fortunately, Musk's X did not use AWS, so it was not affected, which gave netizens the opportunity to discuss this wave of AWS failures.
Some netizens used emoticons to joke that Musk is the biggest winner of this wave of events.
But jokes aside, those affected by this incident may not be able to laugh at all...
Amazon service outage affects various industries
Just how widespread was the Amazon outage? Let's first look at the situation among developers.
Docker is an important application container engine. Some developers found that Docker was completely paralyzed and multiple core services were collectively interrupted.
In addition to Docker, another important development tool, npm , also encountered the same problem, and the popular AI programming tools Cursor and Vercel were also not spared.
In addition to developers, other workers were also affected - the video conferencing software Zoom and OpenAI's same office platform Slack all crashed.
What's interesting is that Amazon is said to have switched to using Zoom for internal meetings this year. This means AWS can't hold online meetings without Zoom, but AWS can't use Zoom unless it fixes it...
Since I can't do my job, why not just slack off?
That won’t work either, because gaming platforms Epic , Sony PlayStation , social platforms like Reddit , and streaming video sites like Netflix, Disney+, and Max are also down.
So I can study, right? Sorry, Duolingo is down, and the student group can't log in to Canvas, the homework platform.
In terms of AI tools, the most famous ChatGPT is also believed to be affected, and the famous AI search tool Perplexity is also on the list.
Moreover, the impact has spread from online to offline. Taxi-hailing apps have crashed, McDonald's and Starbucks have crashed, and people cannot call taxis or order food in their daily lives.
Airlines such as United Airlines and Delta Airlines were also affected and were unable to check in passengers and handle luggage.
What's worse than not being able to get on a plane is not being able to get off it. A netizen shared his experience on Xiaohongshu, saying that the Delta Airlines flight he was on could not dock after landing, and everyone on the plane could only wait on the runway. The captain announced that the reason was Amazon's outage.
What’s even worse is that the users of smart door locks were unable to unlock their doors due to network problems, but the alarm function of the door locks was working properly, which attracted the police to their door.
Of course, Amazon's other smart home products, such as Alexa , have completely stopped working due to the lack of network services.
The situation even affected Britain on the other side of the Atlantic.
For example, the Premier League officially announced that due to the impact of the AWS failure, the semi-automatic offside system malfunctioned in the match between West Ham United and Brentford. If necessary during the game, the previous manual line-drawing method will be used to assist in the judgment.
Of course, the list of “victims” is very long…
Why is the Internet so fragile?
This time, the problem occurred on AWS's us-east-1 server, and the direct cause was a DNS (Domain Name System) resolution issue.
AWS said the problem originated in a subsystem of EC2's internal networking that monitors and manages the health of the network load balancer.
The monitoring system's anomaly caused unstable network connections, database access delays, and some API request failures. As a result, multiple core cloud services experienced widespread outages.
us-east-1 is the earliest region established by AWS, with the longest infrastructure history and the most diverse services. A large number of companies deploy core services in us-east-1.
us-east-1 is not only the home base for compute and storage resources, but also serves as the centralized hosting region for many global control plane services. This means that even if other regions are operating normally locally, control plane operations such as deployment, authentication, and permission changes still rely on us-east-1 .
This makes us-east-1 different from other Amazon servers, and its failure can affect the world.
And this is not the first time us-east-1 has crashed. Similar "large-scale paralysis" incidents have occurred in the past few years (2020, 2021, and 2023), each time affecting a large number of online services.
Failures are inevitable, but the extent of the failures reveals the problems that exist on the Internet.
Large cloud services like Amazon's have indeed improved global network security and stability, but success is also due to their own limitations. This standardized, centralized service means that any small failure could have catastrophic consequences.
To avoid this situation, website developers need to set up a resilience mechanism .
Some netizens on Hacker News said that their static sites connected to multiple regions through CloudFront and did not bet entirely on us-east-1, so they were not affected in this incident.
Moreover, this native multi-region, failover deployment method is not technically complex and does not significantly increase costs.
Web service developers, it's time to re-examine your deployment strategies.
Reference Links:
[1]https://www.theverge.com/news/802486/aws-outage-alexa-fortnite-snapchat-offline#comments
[2]https://www.wired.com/story/what-that-huge-aws-outage-reveals-about-the-internet/
[3]https://www.businessinsider.com/ring-starbucks-alexa-app-down-aws-outage-issues-2025-10
[4]https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/20/amazon-web-services-outage-hits-airline-websites-other-major-sites.html
[5]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640838
This article comes from the WeChat public account "Quantum Bit" , author: Cressey, and is authorized to be published by 36Kr.
