Amazon is a vast company whose business spans areas as diverse as eCommerce/marketplace, advertising, logistics, hardware, artificial intelligence, and video and music streaming. However, among these business areas is one that, while less well-known to the general public, is of extreme importance both for the company itself and for thousands of other companies around the world. Are you familiar with Amazon Web Services?
The collapse of multiple services worldwide due to the outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) once again highlights the enormous dependence the global digital infrastructure has on Amazon’s cloud. On Monday, the disruption caused widespread failures and massive disconnections that affected millions of users in Spain and across the globe—and it is quite likely that you have been impacted as well.
As explained by Amazon itself, the failure originated in the AWS region US-EAST-1, located in Northern Virginia (United States), one of the most critical areas for Amazon’s global infrastructure. In fact, Amazon referred to an “increase in error rates and latency across various AWS services”, which resulted in cascading interruptions.
Around 11:30 AM Spanish time, AWS explained that there was “an issue with the Domain Name System (DNS) that prevented many services from locating and communicating with the DynamoDB database. This affected other services and global services that rely on US-EAST-1.” Shortly thereafter, AWS reported that “We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be successful.”
Imagine AWS as a gigantic office and DynamoDB as the central filing cabinet where everyone stores and retrieves crucial information: for another AWS service to use the cabinet, it needs its extension number or exact location. The DNS system (Domain Name System) serves as the telephone directory or internal directory of that office. When the error occurred, whenever an employee (another service) asked the directory, “What is the extension number for DynamoDB?” the directory could not provide the correct IP address.
Since the services could not obtain DynamoDB’s address, they were unable to locate or communicate with it, and many AWS services depend on DynamoDB for basic operations (such as identifying users, checking their permissions, or determining where to look for certain data). When they could not “find” the central filing cabinet, these services failed in succession. They were unable to perform their tasks and crashed. Given that the affected region (US-EAST-1) handles many of AWS’s functions, the failure spread to global services that, even if physically located elsewhere, still required that central address.
However, the situation did not resolve as simply as it might have seemed. Around 4:15 PM(CEST), AWS again warned of significant failures affecting multiple services, once more creating a sense of uncertainty throughout the sector. Nevertheless, according to reports from Down Detector, the chain reaction of disruptions was comparatively less severe.
The failure demonstrated the high concentration of digital services that rely on Amazon’s platform, resulting in daily applications and platforms in Spain ceasing to function properly.
Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it. — Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) October 20, 2025
Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.
— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) October 20, 2025
Amazon Web Services (AWS), launched in 2006, is a cloud services provider offering everything from infrastructure technologies such as computing, storage, and database management to emerging technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence. This enables existing applications to be migrated to the cloud more quickly, easily, and cost-effectively and allows for the creation of virtually anything one can imagine.
AWS provides cloud hosting and computing services to more than one million companies worldwide, including some of the largest corporations and many of the world’s most-visited websites, all of which depend on AWS to function properly—such as Amazon itself, Disney+, Tinder, Netflix, among others. Therefore, an outage of AWS servers can cause serious disruptions in the global digital business landscape, destabilizing not only Amazon’s internal operations but also the functions of hundreds of tools and websites, potentially compromising the overall stability of the digital ecosystem. At present, Amazon Web Services controls approximately one third of the global cloud market, placing it far ahead of its closest competitor, Microsoft’s Azure, as well as Google Cloud.
This enormous customer base resulted in net revenues for AWS rising by 19% year-over-year to $107.6 billion for Amazon during fiscal year 2024.
As previously mentioned, AWS’s worldwide popularity means that any type of unforeseen incident can substantially compromise the proper functioning of numerous websites across the globe. This was clearly demonstrated, for example, in December 2021, with the six-hour interruption of AWS services.
On December 11, Amazon’s cloud services provider experienced an outage that disrupted several of the company’s operations throughout parts of the United States. The outage lasted approximately six hours, affecting a range of websites, applications, and digital tools associated with the platform. Among those affected were smart products such as roombas, home assistants, security systems, and others. According to the company’s statement, the situation was caused by an error in an automated process.
“An automated activity intended to scale the capacity of one of the AWS services hosted on the primary AWS network triggered unexpected behavior from a large number of clients within the internal network. This resulted in a significant surge in connection activity that overwhelmed the networking devices between the internal network and the AWS primary network, causing delays in communications between these networks.”
According to the company’s report, the outage even affected Amazon’s own ability to identify the root cause at the time, as their monitoring tools and primary internal controls were themselves experiencing the effects of the outage.
Image: Depositphotos
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
Δ