Amazon AWS large-scale outage causes global application paralysis, affecting at least 1,000 companies including Reddit and Coinbase

Zhitong
2025.10.20 22:30
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Amazon's cloud service AWS experienced a massive outage on Monday, causing at least a thousand companies and thousands of websites, including Reddit and Coinbase, to be unable to function properly. This is the most severe internet infrastructure disruption since last year's CrowdStrike incident, highlighting the global digital services' heavy reliance on a few cloud service providers. AWS stated that the issue originated from the EC2 internal network subsystem, and some services have begun to recover, but there is still a high error rate

According to Zhitong Finance APP, Amazon's (AMZN.US) cloud service AWS experienced a massive outage on Monday, causing thousands of websites and popular applications, including Snap (SNAP.US), Reddit (RDDT.US), Venmo, Duolingo (DUOL.US), Coinbase (COIN.US), and Robinhood (HOOD.US), to be unavailable, disrupting business operations in many parts of the world.

This is the most severe internet infrastructure disruption since last year's CrowdStrike (CRWD.US) incident, which paralyzed hospital, bank, and airport systems, highlighting the high dependency risk of global digital services on a few cloud service providers.

As of 1 AM Beijing time, some services began to gradually recover, but AWS acknowledged that multiple cloud services still had a "high error rate," with computing services like Lambda experiencing anomalies due to internal subsystem failures.

Network speed testing company Ookla's Downdetector showed that at 1 AM, affected user reports exceeded 9,300, up from a peak of 5,800 earlier in the morning. AWS stated that the issue originated from the internal network subsystem of EC2, involving the failure of components monitoring the health of network load balancers.

AWS indicated that recovery signs have been seen in some data centers and is rolling out repair measures to other locations, but has not provided a comprehensive recovery timeline. The source of the outage was located at AWS's US-EAST-1 data center in Northern Virginia, which is one of AWS's earliest, largest, and often serves as the default service area, having experienced widespread outages in 2020 and 2021.

The impact of this failure is extensive. Lloyds Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, Vodafone, BT, and the UK HM Revenue and Customs website were also affected. Although Snapchat's failure reports have decreased from their peak, they remain significantly above normal levels; Amazon's own services, such as its shopping website, Prime Video, and Alexa, also experienced functional anomalies. Gaming platforms like Fortnite, Clash Royale, Clash of Clans, and ride-sharing platform Lyft Inc (LYFT.US) were also impacted. Ookla stated that the incident affected over 4 million users and involved at least 1,000 companies.

Experts pointed out that this incident is not a singular technical issue but once again exposes the structural "single point concentration" risk in the global digital ecosystem, where the stability of a few cloud giants determines whether thousands of businesses and government systems can operate. Although there are currently no signs indicating that this was caused by a cyberattack, the scope and destructiveness of the incident have raised external speculation.

Cybersecurity agency Sophos stated that as a core cloud infrastructure, any internal weakness in AWS could trigger global-level chain reactions

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