Amazon outage cripples internet connectivity for major websites and services

Amazon Web Services outage has caused disruptions to a wide range of online services, including Apple TV, Snapchat, Venmo, Delta Airlines, and more. The failure highlights a concerning reliance on the cloud service. Amazon is investigating the root cause of the issue, which has affected numerous websites and services hosted on the platform.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant outage early Monday, September 12, 2025, causing widespread disruptions to numerous online services. The outage affected various platforms, including Apple TV, Snapchat, Venmo, Delta Airlines, and more, highlighting the extensive reliance on the cloud service. AWS reported an operational issue in the US-EAST-1 region, leading to increased error rates for multiple services, according to a Yahoo Finance report.

The outage originated from a DNS resolution problem with the DynamoDB API endpoint, which is a critical component of AWS's cloud infrastructure. AWS has since stated that the underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most service operations are succeeding normally. However, some services continue to experience issues, and the company is working towards full recovery, the Yahoo Finance report added.

The impact of the outage was substantial, affecting a wide range of services. According to Downdetector, which tracks online outages, the outage has impacted multiple services that depend on AWS infrastructure. Some of the major companies affected include Meta Platforms' Facebook and WhatsApp, Walt Disney's Disney+, Snap's Snapchat, the McDonald's app, Reddit, United Airlines, AT&T, T-Mobile US, Roblox, and Vodafone, the Yahoo Finance report said.

The outage has also highlighted the growing dependency on cloud services for various industries. Amazon's Prime Video and Alexa devices were among the first to recover, while platforms like Coinbase, Snapchat, and Canva continued to experience spotty connectivity through Monday afternoon, according to Altitudes Magazine.

This is not the first time AWS has experienced such an outage. In 2020, a similar incident affected services like Roku, iCloud, and Adobe. In 2021, Disney+, Netflix, and Coinbase were impacted. In 2023, Slack, Zoom, and Shopify were affected, as noted by Altitudes Magazine. These previous outages underscore the potential risks associated with relying on a single cloud provider for critical infrastructure.

AWS has not yet confirmed the root cause of the current outage, but experts suspect a network routing failure or load-balancing malfunction within one of the data centers serving the US-EAST-1 hub. The company has stated that engineers are mitigating network congestion and restoring performance across affected systems, Altitudes Magazine reported.

The outage serves as a reminder of the fragility of the global cloud system. With over 1 million active customers, including critical industries like healthcare, finance, and communications, AWS remains an integral yet risky single point of failure. As the reliance on cloud services continues to grow, providers must build truly distributed failover systems to mitigate such risks, observers told Altitudes Magazine.