A Disruption of Operations

AWS Worldwide Outage

Photo from StockCake / CC BY-SA 4.0

On Oct. 20, 2025, people all over the world reported trouble with major websites and apps such as Canvas, Roblox, Fortnite, Canva, ChatGPT, Roblox, Venmo, Canva, United Airlines, College Board and more. The problems were caused by a crash on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing system that powers a majority of the internet and allows companies to store and manage data using its services. 

The outage began at around 12 a.m. ET in AWS’s largest data hub, the US-East-1 region and was not fixed until around 7 p.m. ET. Since AWS supports around 30% of the worldwide computing market, the disruption had widespread consequences. According to Downdetector, a site that tracks internet outages, more than 2,000 companies were affected, with 8.1 million reports from users.

For students, the outage led to many being unable to turn in assignments, take exams or access school portals. Teachers also struggled to post assignments for their classes. Later, Amazon reported the outage to be caused by a Domain Name System error. This incident serves as a reminder of how important these technologies are in our daily lives.