On October 20, Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud - computing service provided by Amazon, suffered a significant outage. This outage had a far - reaching impact, disrupting thousands of businesses and platforms across the globe. Among the affected were well - known apps such as Snapchat and Reddit.

The root of the failure lay in the US - EAST - 1 data center located in Virginia, USA. It's worth noting that this data center had faced similar problems in both 2020 and 2021. According to Amazon, the outage was triggered by an issue within the underlying subsystem of the EC2 internal network. This network is responsible for monitoring the health status of load balancers.

Due to this problem, some applications were unable to find the correct address of AWS's DynamoDB database through the Domain Name System (DNS). After several hours of intense repair work, AWS services were restored to normal operation at 3 PM US time. However, some services were still dealing with a backlog of messages.

This incident stands out as the most extensive network outage since the CrowdStrike system crash in 2024.