Everything from your favorite apps to major banking services stumbled on October 20, 2025, after an unexpected failure at Amazon Web Services . More than 4 million user-reported disruptions and a warning from threat-intelligence veteran Rafe Pilling — “any issue can cause a major upset” — pointed to the scale of the breakdown.

With AWS now tracking the fallout and restoring services, here’s a close-up look at what failed, why, and how the internet is getting back on its feet.

What Is AWS?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon’s cloud-computing division, offering on-demand services like data storage, computing power and networking to businesses and apps worldwide.

Why Did AWS Go Down Today?

The outage that hit AWS on October 20, 2025 began around 3 a.m. ET in its US-EAST-1 region (No

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