On Monday, October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS), a critical cloud platform supporting a significant portion of the global internet infrastructure, experienced a major outage. The incident led to widespread disruption across numerous prominent websites and applications, affecting millions of users worldwide. The root cause of the issue was identified as a DNS resolution failure impacting the DynamoDB API endpoint, originating specifically in the AWS US-East-1 region located in Virginia.

The failure triggered a cascading effect across services hosted within that region, resulting in extensive downtime for popular platforms such as Snapchat, Canva, Fortnite, Robinhood, and Perplexity AI. Even Amazon's proprietary services, including Alexa and Prime Video, were affected. Users around the world reported difficulties with logins, unresponsive applications, and missing functionalities. Downdetector, a platform that monitors real-time service outages, registered thousands of reports within the first hour of the disruption.

AWS confirmed that its teams were working on “multiple parallel paths” to address the problem. After several hours, the company announced that the issue had been “fully mitigated.” However, some services continued to experience residual lag as queued requests were gradually processed and cleared. This most recent outage serves as a stark reminder of the pivotal role AWS occupies within the broader digital ecosystem. As an increasing number of enterprises across diverse sectors—including finance, entertainment, retail, and artificial intelligence, grow more reliant on cloud platforms, the inherent risks associated with centralized infrastructure failures become increasingly apparent.

The outage also raised questions about its impact on African startups. While Downdetector primarily reported issues within the AWS US-East-1 region, some Snapchat users in Nigeria reported experiencing service disruptions. As of the time of publication, no outages were revealed by Downdetector concerning any African businesses directly. This incident underscores that even with AWS’s boasted high availability across its various regions, a critical fault in one zone can precipitate a widespread cascading failure. For African startups and businesses, especially those dependent on US-based infrastructure—the outage highlights the imperative for robust backup systems and diversified hosting strategies. Notably, telecommunication companies like MTN and Airtel are actively positioning themselves as alternatives to hyperscalers such as AWS by developing Tier 3 and Tier 4 data centers in Lagos, Nigeria. As of now, AWS has not released full technical details regarding the outage or disclosed specific measures it plans to implement to prevent future recurrences.