On October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that its services have been restored after a global outage that disrupted numerous companies’ applications and websites in the US East Coast overnight, affecting over 6.5 million users worldwide.
AWS provides on-demand computing power, data storage, and other digital services for businesses, governments, and individuals. Server outages can have a significant impact on websites and platforms that rely on its cloud infrastructure.
After approximately three hours of downtime, AWS services gradually resumed on Monday morning at 6 am US East Coast time. AWS stated that some affected services were showing “significant signs of recovery.” According to the latest outage update on its status page, “most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through the backlog of queued requests.”
Amazon’s cloud services support a large part of the internet, accounting for around one-third of the cloud market. Any interruption can lead to significant ripple effects.
Most companies affected by the AWS issue have reported that their services are back online.
Down Detector, a website that aggregates user-submitted reports of online service interruptions, confirmed receiving over 6.5 million global reports related to the AWS outage incident, as stated by a spokesperson from its parent company Ookla in an email to CNN.
According to Ookla’s statistics, following the outage, the US submitted over 1.4 million reports; the UK submitted over 800,000 reports; the Netherlands and Australia submitted over 400,000 reports each; and France and Japan submitted over 350,000 reports each.
Airlines were also impacted by the outage. United Airlines mentioned that the global AWS outage caused its applications and websites to be inaccessible overnight. The airline added that some of its internal systems were temporarily affected.
“United Airlines has activated backup systems to end the technical disruption, and our team is working hard to ensure a smooth travel experience for passengers,” the statement read.
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Delta Air Lines stated that due to the outage, the airline experienced minor delays in a few flights on Monday morning, with no expectation of major impacts on passengers.
This AWS outage is the largest-scale network disruption since the CrowdStrike incident last year, which paralyzed technical systems in hospitals, banks, and airports, highlighting the vulnerability of global internet technology.