Amazon has grown since it launched as an online bookstore in 1995 to become the dominant player in web hosting 30 years later.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) was launched in 2006, and over the last decade, it has become the largest cloud computing provider in the world.

AWS generated $107.6 billion in revenue for Amazon in 2024, a 19% increase from the previous year. While that is only a fraction of the $670 billion the company brought in, AWS is so popular and cost-effective that it accounts for over 50% of Amazon’s yearly profits.

Netflix, Adobe, Apple, Capital One, Disney, and BMW all use AWS computing power to run their online presences. NASA, GE, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson do as well.

So when users started reporting outages early the morning of Oct. 20, there was no telling how big the problem was.

AWS is the infrastructure undergirding much of the internet.

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Amazon says it has fixed global AWS outage issue

Early on Oct. 20, a notice on the AWS status page said that it was experiencing DNS, or Domain Name System, issues with its database service, DynamoDB, which underpins many of its other applications.

DNS allows web browsers to find websites by translating their names into IP addresses.

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The first outage was reported at 12:11 a.m. PDT in AWS’ US-East-1 region hosted in northern Virginia. By 3:35 a.m. PDT, AWS said the issue had been fully mitigated and that operations were back to normal.

But the company has continued fixing the issue all morning, while providing numerous updates.

According to the outage detection and reporting website Downdetector, several high-profile clients were affected.

U.S. companies affected by AWS outage:

  • Robinhood
  • Reddit
  • Lyft
  • Disney
  • Amazon
  • Verizon
  • United Airlines
  • Duolingo
  • Roblox

Users on Downdetector showed some concern about the issue.

“I hope it comes back up. We need AWS to run our weekly payroll later today,” user Matthew Fierro wrote.

Thousands of people commented on X, formerly Twitter, but one high-profile user took the opportunity to kick Amazon while it was down.

Elon Musk makes fun of AWS capabilities during global outage

Ever the gamesman, self-proclaimed online troll Elon Musk on Oct. 20 took a shot at AWS on X.

“Messages on X chat are fully encrpyted with no advertising hooks or strange ‘AWS dependencies,’ so I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head,” Musk said. “You can do file transfers and audio/video calls.”

While AWS was down, he made sure to note that “X works.”

The outage didn’t just affect websites in the U.S. AWS is a global company, and in the UK, banking giant Lloyds and telecom service providers Vodafone and BT reported issues as well.

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