Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the world’s biggest cloud platforms, suffered a major outage on Monday, 20 October 2025, knocking several popular apps and websites offline for hours.
The issue started in AWS’s US-East-1 region in Virginia, after a DNS resolution failure affected its DynamoDB API. This technical glitch quickly spread across services that depend on the same region, causing widespread disruption.
Among the affected platforms were Coinbase mobile app, Snapchat, Canva, Fortnite, Robinhood, and Perplexity AI. Even Amazon’s own services—Alexa and Prime Video — weren’t spared. Users around the world reported login issues, frozen apps, and missing features. According to Downdetector, outage reports surged within the first hour of the breakdown.
AWS later said its engineers worked on “multiple parallel paths” to fix the problem and eventually announced that the issue had been “fully mitigated.” However, some services continued to lag as AWS cleared pending requests.
Why It Matters
This incident highlights how deeply AWS is woven into the internet’s infrastructure. From entertainment and finance to e-commerce and artificial intelligence, countless companies depend on AWS to run their services — making any outage a big deal.
For African startups and businesses that host their data on US-based servers, the downtime is a reminder of how vulnerable centralised cloud systems can be. While Downdetector reported no confirmed outages among African businesses, some Snapchat users in Nigeria did experience service interruptions.
The Way Forward
The outage has renewed calls for cloud diversification — where businesses spread their data across multiple providers to avoid a single point of failure.
Telecom giants like MTN and Airtel are already positioning themselves as alternatives to global hyperscalers by building Tier 3 and Tier 4 data centres in Lagos, Nigeria.
AWS hasn’t yet released a full technical report or said what long-term steps it will take to prevent a repeat. But one thing is clear — when AWS sneezes, the internet catches a col
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