An outage on Monday affected web hosting giant Amazon Web Services (AWS), which took out vast swathes of the web, including websites, banks, and some government services. On Monday afternoon, the company offered an update on the cause of the issue and said it was working to restore services. At 6:01 PM ET, Amazon said all AWS services had returned to normal operations.
In an announcement on the Amazon website, the company shared that the underlying issue was related to DNS resolution. DNS, or Domain Name System, is a system that converts web addresses into IP addresses so that customer apps and websites can load. While some glitches can be resolved quickly, DNS issues can sometimes take longer to resolve.
“AWS reported increased error rates for multiple services and determined that the issue was related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoints in the N. Virginia (us-east-1) Region,” the announcement stated. “The underlying DNS issue was fully mitigated at 2:24 AM PDT.”
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/21/amazon-dns-outage-breaks-much-of-the-internet/
Popular platforms such as Snapchat, Reddit, Venmo, Twitch, Signal, and Alexa were among those impacted, along with several banking and enterprise services.
Users of the company’s Ring doorbell cameras and Alexa-powered smart speakers posted on DownDetector that they weren’t working.