Updated 21/10/2025
In the fallout from the outage yesterday, many companies are asking questions on how similar incidents can be prevented in the future.
Jake Madders, Co-Founder and Director of Hyve Managed Hosting, commented: “The key lies in building resilience into your infrastructure from the outset. Diversifying across multiple cloud providers and geographic regions is essential to ensure redundancy and enable seamless failover when disruption occurs. Just as important is decoupling critical services – such as, for example, identity management, DNS, and core data layers – from any single provider, so that if one ecosystem is impacted, your operations can continue elsewhere.” (Capacity)
Updated 21/10/2025
The AWS outage has now ended, with Amazon stating that they have fixed the underlying cause, and that all services have returned to normal operations.
While services have now resumed, the impact of the outage was significant. Over 1000 companies were affected by the outage, and many sites and applications experienced over 6 hours of disruption and downtime. The widespread impact of the outage highlights the dangers of cloud concentration, where companies are reliant on a single provider.
In the days following the outage, Amazon’s focus will now be on assessing what happened, why it happened, and how to prevent similar incidents in the future. Impacted businesses will be focusing on recovery after the incident, assessing financial losses from the downtime, and catching up with backlogs.
Updated 20/10/2025 12.35pm
Amazon has released a statement that they have resolved the issue that caused the outage. Services are now beginning to be restored, however it is expected to take some time for a full return to normal operations.
Updated 20/10/2025 11.45am
Amazon has stated that “We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS Services. We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered. We continue to work towards full resolution and will provide updates as we have more information to share.”
The issue appears to be related to a Domain Name System (DNS) issue. DNS refers to the system which translates website names into machine-readable IP addresses. DNS disruptions can mean that browsers are unable to locate and load content.
Lloyds has confirmed that the issues with their services, and those of their subsidiaries Halifax and Bank of Scotland, are related to the AWS outage.
20/10/2025 10.45am
Amazon reported to the BBC that “We have identified a potential root cause for error rates for the DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region. We are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.”
Impacted services include workplace applications Slack, Zoom, and Canva, as well as consumer applications Snapchat, Roblox, and Duolingo. Reports are also stating that the UK’s HMRC website is not working correctly, displaying an error message for many users.
There are additionally reports that customers of major banks, including Lloyds, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland are facing outages, leaving customers unable to access their online and mobile banking accounts. It is unknown whether this is linked to the AWS outage, or a separate incident.