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Diwali Blackout: How the AWS Outage Crippled Major Apps Across the World

Diwali Blackout: How the AWS Outage Crippled Major Apps Across the World

The global AWS outage impacted thousands of websites and platforms such as Apple TV, Canva, Fortnite, Reddit, and Snapchat.

Written by Akash Dutta, Edited by Ketan Pratap | Updated: 21 October 2025 15:34 IST

Diwali Blackout: How the AWS Outage Crippled Major Apps Across the World

Photo Credit: Reuters

Amazon said the root cause behind the global outage was a DNS error

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Highlights

Amazon’s AWS outage lasted nearly 12 hours on October 20
The company’s Fire TV services also went down during the outage
It was the largest outage since the Crowdstrike incident last year

Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a major outage on Monday, October 20, impacting thousands of websites and users worldwide. The outage coincided with the day India was celebrating the festival of Diwali, resulting in several online businesses suffering disruptions while running Diwali-specific promotions and campaigns. As per an outage tracker, AWS was down for nearly 12 hours, although some services went back online earlier than others. Some of the major platforms that suffered an outage due to the disruption include Apple TV, Canva, Fortnite, Reddit, Snapchat, and Starbucks, as well as several government agencies.

What Happened During the AWS Outage

According to the Internet outage monitor Downdetector, users of the platform began reporting issues with AWS services starting at 4am ET (1:30pm IST) on October 20. The reports peaked at 8am ET (5:30pm IST) with more than 13,000 users impacted by the outage. Users kept mass reporting the outage till 2pm ET (11:30 pm IST).

Since AWS is a major cloud service provider for a large number of platforms and websites, the outage resulted in websites and apps such as Apple TV, Canva, Fire TV, Fortnite, Hulu, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, and Starbucks also facing issues. For instance, Fire TV services were not able to connect to the server, and users could not play any content on their smart TVs.

WhatsApp Services Restored After Users Report Outage

Due to its far-reaching impacts across major corporations and government-led agencies, it is considered the largest Internet outage since the Crowdstrike incident that took down Microsoft services among others last year. The full extent of the financial impact of the outage is currently not known.

The outage also led to discussion on the downside of a single company controlling the access to the Internet for so many major websites. Billionaire and X CTO Elon Musk was quick to point to the fact that Signal, a privacy-focused instant messaging platform, also went down due to the AWS outage, questioning its reliability. He also took the opportunity to promote his X Chat.

What Caused the AWS Outage

On its Service Health status page, AWS highlighted that during the preliminary analysis, it found that the event was triggered due to a “Domain Name System (DNS) resolution issue for the regional DynamoDB service endpoints”, which led to increased error rates and latencies for its services in the US-East-1 Region. The issue led to a subsequent “impairment in the internal subsystem of EC2, which led to the Network Load Balancer health checks also becoming impaired.

The cascading chain of events led to the massive system failure, which took AWS nearly 12 hours to fix. AWS said it will share a detailed post-event summary in the coming days.

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Further reading: Amazon, AWS, AWS Outage, Apple TV, Canva, Fortnite, Reddit, Snapchat, Fire TV

Akash Dutta Email Akash Dutta

Akash Dutta is a Chief Sub Editor at Gadgets 360. He is particularly interested in the social impact of technological developments and loves reading about emerging fields such as AI, metaverse, and fediverse. In his free time, he can be seen supporting his favourite football club - Chelsea, watching movies and anime, and sharing passionate opinions on food. More