What Happened with the AWS Outage—and Why It Matters to You
You probably noticed the widespread web outage on October, 20th; but what really happened?
On October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the world’s largest cloud computing providers, experienced a major outage that disrupted thousands of websites and apps across the globe.
From Snapchat and Roblox to Amazon Retail, banking portals, and government services, the ripple effect was massive—over 16 million outage reports were logged across 60+ countries in just one day
🧠 What Is AWS—and Why Did It Go Down?
Think of AWS as the “invisible engine” powering many of the apps and websites you use every day. It provides cloud services like storage, databases, and computing power. In this case, a DNS resolution issue in AWS’s US-EAST-1 region (based in Virginia) caused a domino effect. When one key part of the system failed—specifically, the database service DynamoDB—it disrupted authentication and access across countless platforms.
Because many companies rely on this single region for critical services, the failure spread quickly. Even teams couldn’t log into AWS to fix the issue right away, which slowed recovery efforts.
🌍 Why Did So Many Services Go Down?
Modern apps are built like Lego towers—stacked on top of cloud services. If the bottom block (like DNS or a database) breaks, the whole tower can tumble. That’s what happened here. The outage affected:
Social & gaming apps (Snapchat, Roblox)
Financial services (UK banks like Lloyds)
Smart home devices (Ring, Alexa)
Education & work tools (Zoom, Instructure)
Even parts of Amazon itself!
🛡️ Why Microsoft Wasn’t Affected
Unlike AWS, Microsoft Azure uses a more distributed architecture and multi-region failover strategies. This means if one region has issues, traffic can be rerouted to another—keeping services online. Microsoft’s resilience planning and infrastructure diversity helped it avoid the blast radius of this outage.
🤝 Why You Should Partner with Us
At inWorks LLC, we’re proud to be Microsoft partners. That means:
We build on reliable, resilient infrastructure like Azure.
We prioritize business continuity and fail-safe design.
We offer secure, scalable solutions that won’t leave you stranded during outages.
This outage is a wake-up call for businesses everywhere: don’t put all your eggs in one cloud basket. By partnering with us, you’re choosing a team that’s aligned with Microsoft’s best-in-class standards—and committed to keeping your operations running smoothly, no matter what.
📢 Final Thought
Cloud outages are inevitable—but how you prepare for them makes all the difference. Let’s talk about how we can help you build smarter, safer systems with Microsoft at your side.
📞 Call us at 267-857-8066 to start the conversation.
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