Oct 20 AWS US‑EAST‑1 Outage Disrupts Millions

On October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage in its critical US‑EAST‑1 region caused by a DNS resolution error that affected DynamoDB and related APIs. The failure knocked thousands of sites and apps offline across sectors — banking and payments, airlines, government services, schools, hospitals, gaming, streaming, smart‑home devices and crypto platforms — leaving millions of users and numerous businesses disrupted before engineers restored services hours later. Early estimates put economic losses in the multi‑billion‑dollar range, and analysts said the incident underscored concentration risk from dependence on a few cloud providers and the need for better redundancy and automated failovers. Security experts warned outages can heighten data‑exposure risks during failovers, backups and recovery, and urged independent, autonomous security layers. UK MPs and digital‑rights advocates called the outage an infrastructure and democratic concern and urged regulators to consider designating critical third parties or requiring greater cloud diversification.