Updates: Amazon AWS struggles to recover as outage hits Snapchat, apps

If you would like to read more about the Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage, you can find more of our reporting here.

We will be closing this live page soon. Here’s a brief recap of the day’s main events:

• An Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage has caused connectivity issues for people and businesses around the world, with popular apps and services such as Snapchat, Venmo, Netflix, Fortnite, and numerous banks and airlines seeing problems reported.
• Amazon said that it was working to identify and fix the problem, which the company says originated in an EC2 internal network. But disruptions have continued to be reported throughout the day.
• The outage monitoring service Downdetector said that it had received more than 11 million reports of connectivity issues since the beginning of the outage, with more than 2,500 companies seeing an increase in reported issues. Experts have said the toll of the outage could run into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
• Some analysts have pointed out that the outage underscores the potential risks and pitfalls of the highly concentrated nature of cloud services, with just three companies accounting for more than half of the global market.

“We continue to observe recovery across all AWS services, and instance launches are succeeding across multiple Availability Zones in the US-EAST-1 Regions,” the company said in an update.

“For Lambda, customers may face intermittent function errors for functions making network requests to other services or systems as we work to address residual network connectivity issues. To recover Lambda’s invocation errors, we slowed down the rate of SQS polling via Lambda Event Source Mappings. We are now increasing the rate of SQS polling as we experience more successful invocations and reduced function errors.”

Bryson Bort, chief executive of the threat emulation platform Scythe, has said that the current AWS outage was probably not the result of a cyberattack.

“Whenever we see these headlines, the first thought that goes through everybody’s mind, that shiver up the spine, is ‘Is this one of those cyberattacks? Is this a military or intelligence-led thing that has led to this disruption?’ And in this case, it’s not,” Bort told Al Jazeera.

“In fact, most of the time it isn’t. It’s usually human error.”

“Our mitigations to resolve launch failures for new EC2 instances continue to progress and we are seeing increased launches of new EC2 instances and decreasing networking connectivity issues in the US-EAST-1 Region,” AWS said.

“We are also experiencing significant improvements to Lambda invocation errors, especially when creating new execution environments (including for Lambda@Edge invocations).”

As the widespread impact of the AWS outage takes a toll on businesses and websites around the world, the digital rights group Article 19 has said that the incident indicates the negative impacts of economic concentration in the tech sector.

“These disruptions are not just technical issues, they’re democratic failures. When a single provider goes dark, critical services go offline with it – media outlets become inaccessible, secure communication apps like Signal stop functioning, and the infrastructure that serves our digital society crumbles,” Corinne Cath-Speth, head of digital issues at Article 19, said in a statement.

“We urgently need diversification in cloud computing. The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism, and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies.”

The US news outlet CNN has reported that estimates for the financial impact of the outage could reach hundreds of billions of dollars, according to Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint.

“The incident highlights the complexity and fragility of the internet, as well as how much every aspect of our work depends on the internet to work,” Daoudi said.

“The financial impact of this outage will easily reach into the hundreds of billions due to loss in productivity for millions of workers that cannot do their job, plus business operations that are stopped or delayed — from airlines to factories.”

The outage monitor says that it has recorded more than 11 million reports since the outage began, with three million reports taking place in the US alone.

It noted that 395 companies were experiencing ongoing issues related to the outage and 2,500 had experienced an increase in issue reports.

Updated look at the total impact of the AWS Outage up to this point!https://t.co/Bgpm1fFGtf pic.twitter.com/TAAxjagNl6

— Downdetector (@downdetector) October 20, 2025

“Our mitigations to resolve launch failures for new EC2 instances are progressing, and the internal subsystems of EC2 are now showing early signs of recovering in a few Availability Zones (AZs) in the US-EAST-1 Region,” AWS said in an update.

“We are applying mitigations to the remaining AZs at which point we expect launch errors and network connectivity issues to subside.”

If you’re just joining us, let’s get you up to speed:

• Amazon says that it is investigating the sources of a widespread outage in its cloud services unit AWS, which accounts for nearly a third of the global market and has left scores of companies and people around the world without access to websites and services.
• The tech giant said that it has “narrowed down” the source of the problem and is seeing increases in connectivity. Amazon said the issue originated within the EC2 internal network.
• Analysts have pointed out that the outage underscores the potential risks and pitfalls of the highly concentrated nature of the cloud services, with just three companies accounting for more than half of the global market.

“We continue to apply mitigation steps for network load balancer health and recovering connectivity for most AWS services,” the company said in an update shared on its website.

“Lambda is experiencing function invocation errors because an internal subsystem was impacted by the network load balancer health checks. We are taking steps to recover this internal Lambda system,” said the update.

“For EC2 launch instance failures, we are in the process of validating a fix and will deploy to the first AZ as soon as we have confidence we can do so safely. We will provide an update by 10:45 AM PDT (1745GMT).”

The cloud service has shared another update on its website.

“We have taken additional mitigation steps to aid the recovery of the underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers and are now seeing connectivity and API recovery for AWS services,” it says.

“We have also identified and are applying next steps to mitigate throttling of new EC2 instance launches. We will provide an update by 10:00 AM PDT.”

While just three tech giants account for more than half of the global cloud market, AWS leads the field by a significant margin.

According to the data firm Statista, AWS alone makes up 30 percent of the global market share, followed by 20 percent for Microsoft Azure and 13 percent for Google Cloud.

They are trailed by other firms such as Alibaba, Oracle, Salesforce, IBM, and Tencent, which make up between two and four percent each.

In an update shared on its website, AWS says that it has “narrowed down the source of the network connectivity issues that impacted AWS Services”.

“The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers,” it added. “We are throttling requests for new EC2 instance launches to aid recovery and actively working on mitigations.”

The widespread disruption caused by the outage has highlighted the outsized role of a small number of major companies in maintaining key infrastructure.

Financial analyst Michael Hewson told the AFP news agency that the incident shows “how reliant we all are on the likes of Amazon, as well as Microsoft and Alphabet, for many of the online services we more or less take for granted”.

“On an economic level, it’s almost akin to putting all of your economic eggs in one basket,” he added.

The web monitor tracking the effect of the AWS outage has released new figures of the number of people worldwide who have reported issues with their connectivity.

In a post on social media, it said more than 8 million people have reported disruptions, including nearly 1.9 million in the US and more than a million in the UK, while the Netherlands, Germany and Australia each saw about half a million people reporting disruptions.

Let’s bring you up to speed.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides cloud services to dozens of companies, apps and websites, is facing a major disruption. We aren’t yet clear on what caused it, but here are the latest developments:

• AWS has posted its latest update, reporting “significant API errors and connectivity issues”, but hasn’t yet identified the cause.
• More than eight million people have reported disruptions, with 1.9 million users in the United States and more than a million in the United Kingdom, according to Downdetector, a a website that tracks online outages.
• Banks, social media apps, gaming platforms and prominent news websites have reported disruptions.
• Despite the disruption, Amazon’s shares have fared quite well at the opening of the US markets on Monday.

We are now almost at nine hours since the first internet outages were reported.

Dozens of websites and apps worldwide that rely on Amazon Web Services for their data and cloud infrastructure are down.

There is still no clarity on what caused the problem at Amazon’s data centre in the US as the company continues to investigate the issue.

Musk has used the Amazon company’s outage as an opportunity to advertise the features on X, the social media platform he owns.

He claimed the chat service on X is better than Signal, a messaging app known for its privacy and encryption, which has been affected by the AWS issue.

“I don’t trust Signal anymore,” Musk posted. “𝕏 Chat, enabled from left menu, is better than Signal,” he said in another post.

𝕏 Chat, enabled from left menu, is better than Signal https://t.co/Kk818Vrzs8

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 20, 2025