Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing arm, suffered a major global outage on Monday, disrupting a wide range of online platforms — from social media and gaming to streaming and finance apps.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing arm, suffered a major global outage on Monday, disrupting a wide range of online platforms — from social media and gaming to streaming and finance apps. Amazon later confirmed that the issue had been “fully mitigated”, though millions of users continued facing disruptions across services like Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, Venmo, Apple TV, and Roblox.
The outage, caused by a malfunction at one of AWS’s data centres in Northern Virginia, coincided with Diwali celebrations in India, creating unexpected chaos for tech professionals on call. One Indian techie described the ordeal in a viral Reddit post titled “Told them not to put me on call for Diwali… see the mayhem now.” The user revealed that despite informing their manager in advance that they couldn’t be on call during the festival, they were still assigned duties.
“Told my manager last week not to put me on call during Diwali. I’ll not be able to handle all alone. His words were, ‘Relax, nothing ever happens this time of the year,’” the techie wrote.
“Fast forward to tonight. AWS is down. Teams are blowing up. Pager won’t stop ringing. My family think I work for the government because I’m handling some emergency,” they added. “I haven’t even lit a single patakha (cracker) yet, but my whole screen’s glowing red. Happy Diwali, I guess.”
The post quickly went viral among Reddit users, sparking a flurry of comments as techies shared their own experiences dealing with the outage.
“So, in my company, the person assigned to on call mentioned on Friday that he wouldn’t be available this week. He said he couldn’t inform us earlier because his schedule got shifted after someone left the company. He’s also traveling this week. He asked others if they could swap on call duties, but no one agreed initially. Later, he said someone else had agreed to take over. But today, when the outage happened, neither of them was available and a third person had to step in after some time,” one user wrote.
“This whole incident just shows why releases shouldn’t be done on weekends. AWS messed things up — no idea what they did this time. Thank God I am not on call this week,” another user added.
Others reassured those caught in the outage, “I don’t think anyone is gonna blame you for it. This outage is huge and a lot of services are down. Major companies like Snapchat and Fidelity are facing issues. You can’t do anything unless your company has some disaster recovery that is not tied to AWS.”
“What people usually fail to understand is that even if OP’s system is heavily dependent on AWS, what matters is how fast you are able to fail over, if that’s possible, or how fast you are able to get back once AWS is back. There can be a lot of details which we might not be aware of,” another user commented.
“Anyways, all the best, OP, and Happy Diwali everyone,” they added.
The outage originated in AWS’s US-East-1 region (Northern Virginia) and was traced to an underlying DNS issue — a failure in the Domain Name System, which translates website names into IP addresses.
According to monitoring site Downdetector, users reported problems with WhatsApp, Signal, Zoom, YouTube, Fortnite, Canva, and Duolingo, among others. AWS engineers said recovery was underway but noted “elevated errors” in some services such as Lambda and EC2.
The outage underscored the central role AWS plays in global digital infrastructure, powering back-end systems for thousands of businesses, startups, and government platforms. Even short-lived disruptions can lead to massive financial losses, stalled operations, and broken user experiences. AWS engineers explained that they had to throttle SQS polling rates in Lambda to manage invocation errors before gradually restoring normal performance.
By 8 a.m. Eastern Time, the company downgraded the status from “degraded” to “impacted,” as recovery continued. Cybersecurity experts described the incident as a wake-up call for industries overly reliant on a few tech giants dominating the cloud computing ecosystem.
