Major AWS Outage Explained: DNS Error Causes Global Disruption Across Reddit, Snapchat, and More
AWS Outage 2025: The Real Reason Behind the Internet’s Temporary Shutdown
Reddit, Snapchat, and other platforms were taken offline due to a major AWS outage caused by a simple error.
More than 100 services were interrupted by an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that affected websites like Reddit. It appears that a Domain Name System (DNS) malfunction at AWS’s data center in Northern Virginia was the root of the problem. An update on the AWS Health Dashboard indicates that the issue was fixed by approximately 6 p.m. ET.
This DNS mistake seems to have been the primary cause of the significant outage in AWS’s largest and oldest data center.
Over a hundred of AWS’s services were unavailable due to an outage that occurred Monday morning.
Platforms that depend on AWS for hosting and content distribution, including Snapchat, Reddit, and Venmo, were also impacted.
Disruptions were also experienced by games including Fortnite, Wordle, and Roblox.
According to the AWS service status page, a Domain Name System (DNS) problem at Amazon’s data facility in Northern Virginia—known as “Data Center Alley,” which is home to hundreds of data centers—caused the outage to begin.
Why a Simple DNS Error Crashed AWS — and Took Down Reddit, Snapchat, and Venmo
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AWS stated on its Health Dashboard at 6:53 p.m. ET that all 142 services that had been unavailable earlier in the day were back online and that the outage had been fixed by approximately 6 p.m.
According to Cloudflare, the Domain Name System (DNS) acts as the internet’s “name-to-number” directory. It converts the human-readable domain name you enter into your browser into a numerical IP address that computers use to locate and connect to the correct server.
DNS errors might result in timeouts or delays when webpages are loading.
Users may believe that the website has disappeared or is not accessible.
A number of additional technical problems followed the DNS failure, such as troubles with cloud computing services and Network Load Balancers (NLB), which control server traffic.
Several AWS services were also impacted by these problems.
Amazon Web Services Outage: Full Timeline, Causes, and Global Impact
AWS is used by millions of enterprises, and Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure are the only two cloud service providers with comparable operations.
Internet service providers frequently experience DNS-related problems, but given AWS’s extensive reach, Monday’s interruption was unprecedented in scope.
In recent years, similar DNS-related failures have also affected other major cloud providers.
A DNS outage occurred in 2021 on Microsoft Azure as a result of an increase in traffic, and on Akamai Edge as a result of a DNS system flaw. Cloudflare later claimed that an internal misconfiguration was the reason behind their DNS resolver’s July outage.
Northern Virginia, the location of the issue, is a typical data center hotspot, according to the AWS Health Dashboard. Hannah Beckler of Business Insider revealed in early October that major tech firms have applied for permission to construct 54 new data centers in Virginia over the first nine months of 2025, the majority of which were designed by Amazon and included some of the biggest projects.
Data centers in Virginia use around one-fourth of the electricity available in the state as of 2023. Despite government assurances of higher tax revenue, local communities have become more and more concerned that these large developments could negatively impact their quality of life.
Requests for comment have not yet received a response from Amazon. Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage