On Monday, October 20, many Amazon Web Services (AWS) went offline due to a core database problem. This left numerous games, publishers, streaming platforms, and apps unusable. The outage seems to come from a process called “DNS resolution” where a computer turns a website domain into an IP address.
On Amazon’s website, the first report occurred at 12:11 a.m. PDT (1:11 a.m. MST), and stated “We are investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services…” Reports were sent out about every 30 minutes, updating users on the status of the outage. By 3:35 a.m. PDT, the issue was reported to be “fully mitigated” and operations were “succeeding normally now.”
The same service also went down in both 2023 and 2024 when users couldn’t access their airline reservations and payment apps.
This event showed a large problem with many major companies that use cloud based servers — thousands of businesses all over the world can be taken out by an unplanned outage. Sites such as Snapchat, Duolingo, Zoom, and even Lloyd’s Banking Group were greatly affected, but are now back online.
