Why Amazon Web Services are down, which services are affected and official updates

A huge Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage has triggered widespread internet disruptions this morning, affecting dozens of popular apps, games, and websites, including Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo, and Ring. Users began reporting issues early morning, with DownDetector recording a massive surge in outage reports for services dependent on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure.

Why Amazon Web Services is down

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is currently experiencing operational issues that have disrupted multiple services in the US-EAST-1 (N. Virginia) region, causing widespread outages and increased error rates. Northern Virginia is a vital hub for the global internet. According to official AWS updates, the problems began with increased error rates and latencies for multiple services, affecting both customer-facing and backend applications.

In a later update at 2.01 pm PDT, Amazon clarified the reason for the outage. AWS said the potential root cause for the increased error rates affecting DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 (N. Virginia) region.


According to AWS, “Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1.” The problem is also affecting other AWS services in the region, including global features that rely on these endpoints, such as IAM updates and DynamoDB Global Tables.

Which AWS services are affected

As of writing this on October 20, AWS confirmed significant issues with Amazon DynamoDB, which is fully disrupted, while 36 other services are impacted; the major ones are

• AWS Lambda
• Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
• Amazon CloudFront
• Amazon S3
• Amazon API Gateway
• Amazon SageMaker
• AWS IAM Identity Center
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
• Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

AWS Systems Manager, among others

AWS updates:

• At 1:26 AM PDT, AWS stated: “We can confirm significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region. This issue also affects other AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region as well. During this time, customers may be unable to create or update Support Cases. Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause. We will continue to provide updates as we have more information to share, or by 2:00 AM.”
• Earlier, at 12:51 AM PDT, AWS noted: “We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. This issue may also be affecting Case Creation through the AWS Support Center or the Support API. We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause. We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share.”
• At 12:11 AM PDT, AWS reported: “We are investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region. We will provide another update in the next 30-45 minutes.”