New Delhi: A widespread online outage on Monday (October 20, 2025) disrupted several major platforms, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon.com, Prime Video, Alexa, Snapchat, Robinhood, Perplexity, and PayPal’s Venmo, according to data from outage tracker Downdetector.
AWS outage triggers global disruptions
The outage, originating from AWS’s US-EAST-1 region, left millions of users worldwide unable to access key services. The cloud computing arm of Amazon confirmed the disruption, citing “increased error rates and latencies” affecting multiple services.
Perplexity’s CEO, Aravind Srinivas, confirmed that the outage was caused by AWS issues. “Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it,” he posted on X.
AWS did not provide a timeline for restoration, but said engineers were actively working to resolve the issue. The US-EAST-1 region is one of the company’s largest data hubs, meaning a technical problem there can have far-reaching consequences for digital platforms.
Impact on users and services
The outage reached its peak in the United States at 1:04 PM IST, with over 15,000 users reporting issues on Amazon platforms. Of those, 50 per cent experienced mobile app problems, 29 per cent encountered homepage issues, and 21 per cent had difficulties with the shopping cart.
Snapchat faced disruptions affecting over 22,000 users, with 58 per cent reporting app issues, 38 per cent encountering server connection problems, and three per cent unable to access the website. Similarly, Venmo, Robinhood, and Coinbase users reported service interruptions.
Global ripple effects
As AWS powers a large number of websites and applications worldwide, the outage affected multiple regions and industries, highlighting the critical role of cloud infrastructure in the global digital economy. Analysts said such outages underscore the need for redundancy, failover systems, and disaster recovery protocols for platforms relying heavily on a single cloud provider.
Company response and recovery efforts
Amazon stated that its engineers were working to restore normal operations but refrained from specifying an exact timeframe. Downdetector and user reports suggest gradual service recovery was observed later in the day, though intermittent issues persisted for several platforms.
The incident serves as a reminder of the vulnerability of digital services to centralised infrastructure failures, affecting millions of users across multiple sectors including e-commerce, social media, streaming, and finance.