Amazon Web Services Outage Causes Global Internet Disruption

Amazon Web Services experienced a massive outage Monday, sending shockwaves across the globe as dozens of popular websites experienced issues.

Shortly after midnight Monday, AWS issued a notice announcing latencies and error rates affecting multiple Amazon Web Services. Reports estimate around 10,000 affected users.

Although most individuals do not use Amazon Web Services directly, many popular apps and websites depend on Amazon’s cloud technology.

Companies like Netflix, Snapchat, Facebook, Capital One and more use AWS to power their organization’s infrastructure as well as government agencies like NASA.

The outage disrupted one of AWS’s largest data center hubs, which houses systems that authenticate users and keep websites loading. As a result, companies are dealing with reports of users not being able to load their website or be authenticated, locking them out of services.

AWS believes the root cause of the issue is a down subsystem that monitors load balance. When the monitoring system is impacted, the network load balancer health checks have problems resulting in increased errors and latencies.

“Our mitigations to resolve launch failures continue to progress and we are seeing increased launches and decreasing networking connectivity issues in the US-EAST-1 region,” AWS said.

AWS reported 29 service interruptions this year.

Billionaire Elon Musk weighed in on the outage on X, using the outage to encourage people to switch to X chat.

The messages are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange “AWS dependencies” such that I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head.

You can also do file transfers and audio/video calls. https://t.co/l0GIIZYz6y

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 20, 2025

“The messages are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange ‘AWS dependencies’ such that I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head.”

Musk’s post seems to be a reference to the encrypted messaging app Signal, which was affected by the outage.