It’s not just you — a massive AWS outage just broke half the internet

It’s October 20, 2025, and you might be wondering why the internet suddenly feels broken. Some of your favorite apps aren’t working, websites refuse to load, and even major online services are timing out. For millions of people across the world, it’s not a local Wi-Fi issue — it’s a cloud one.

Popular platforms like Asana, Perplexity, Snapchat, and games such as Roblox, Fortnite, and Clash Royale have all gone offline or are struggling to connect. Streaming services, payment apps, and even chatbots are also affected. In other words, if it feels like half the internet just vanished, that’s not far from the truth. The full list of affected services is included below.

The source: a major AWS outage

The issue stems from the AWS (Amazon Web Service) outage. The AWS health report shows that there’s an outage in the US-East-1 region from “multiple servers.” This in turn seems to have caused a domino effect that took down the rest and led to this widespread outage. Amazon’s AWS is the backbone for many popular non-Amazon applications. So when AWS has a problem, companies like Netflix, Disney+, Venmno, and various other apps have historically experienced service disruption.

The outage is happening in the largest and most strategically important cloud region globally. This means that the outage is not contained to US East, but has a global ripple effect. The US-EAST-1 (N. Virginia) region is AWS’s oldest and largest data center hub. Crucially, the control planes for many global WS services, such as Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Amazon CloudFront are housed here.

An issue in this region can therefore affect services worldwide, as applications need to authenticate or access the global control plane, even if their data resides elsewhere. So, as it turns out, if your app doesn’t use AWS save for 2FA authentication, then you can use it just fine if you’re still logged in. However, if you’re logged out, you will not be able to log back in during this outage, which is one of the many problems of 2FA and outsourcing it to other platforms.

What services are affected by the AWS outage?

A reminder of cloud fragility

Outages like this reveal how much of the modern internet rests on shared infrastructure. When one of these central pillars falters, the effects ripple globally and knock out everything from productivity tools to entertainment platforms.

For now, users can only wait for AWS engineers to restore service and for the web’s many dependent platforms to recover. It’s a rare but sobering reminder that even the cloud has single points of failure.