For the second time in only nine days, Amazon Web Services has been knocked down by a wave of outage reports, wreaking havoc on major online platforms and services worldwide. On October 29, 2025, the new incident impacting thousands of users and rendering popular websites, apps, and enterprise tools essentially useless was reminiscent of the massive outage just weeks prior.
Details of the Outage
One of the most recent outages left Amazon virtually unable to keep one of its busiest data centres, the US-EAST-1 region, affecting Snapchat, Reddit, Slack, Amazon.com’s retail site, streaming sites, and cloud-based productivity tools. A genuine Amazon user reported trouble using these platforms, and the tracking website DownDetector reported a spike in outage reports. While AWS claims the incident was not as widespread as reported and that its systems are indeed running correctly, providing consumers with a link to its official Health Dashboard, the event has left a cloud over most businesses and developers.
Impact on Services and their Users
The outage impacted a wide range of services, including:
- Social media platforms like snapchat and Reddit.
- Communication tools like slack
- E-commerce and retail sites including Amazon
- Streaming services and enterprise applications relying on AWS EC2, S3, and DynamoDB
Users faced challenges accessing Amazon-linked banking applications, gaming platforms, and smart devices, with some companies issuing reassurances about the safety of user data. The disruption also affected global businesses, highlighting the risks of over-reliance on a single cloud provider.
Root Cause and Response
While the reasons for the most recent outage are yet to be determined, multiple sources indicate it is tied to additional pressure on the infrastructure in the US-EAST-1 region. The possible source of the outage could be related to this location as well, since, as reports showed, the first one occurring on October 20 was its direct consequence. In that situation, a 15-hour-long outage caused by a DNS failure resulting from two autonomous systems updating data simultaneously resulted in approximately $581 million in potential insured loss to Amazon. AWS stated that they would “learn and improve availability and durability of services in all affected regions”, however, this has once again heightened discussions on multi-cloud availability and resilience planning.
Broader Implications
Given that AWS accounts for more than 30% of the global cloud market, brief outages could have disrupted the operations of multiple industries. The events emphasised the dangers of centralised cloud architectures and the lack of diverse failover mechanisms and dependencies. Security analysts and other industry figures have demanded more resilient infrastructure solutions to minimise potential business interruption.
Conclusion
The recurring AWS outages during the second wave of October 2025 underscore the growing need for multi-cloud and a more robust approach to reducing reliance on service providers. While AWS continues to work on resolving the identified concerns, the case is a wake-up call for the rest of the tech community, emphasising the need for preparatory action and diversification of critical dependencies.