Which sites and apps have been hit by mass AWS internet outage?Sites and apps, including Snapchat, Fortnite, Zoom and Duolingo, were down on Monday after a problem with Amazon Web Services.
Which sites and apps have been hit by mass AWS internet outage?Sites and apps, including Snapchat, Fortnite, Zoom and Duolingo, were down on Monday after a problem with Amazon Web Services.Ross McGuinness, James Hockaday Mon 20 October 2025 at 3:30 pm UTC7 min read
A number of apps and sites went down in an internet outage. (Downdetector)
More than 1,000 companies were affected by a widespread internet outage on Monday, leading to hundreds of popular websites, including Amazon, Reddit and Halifax, becoming inaccessible to users.
According to online outage tracker Downdetector, large numbers of services and platforms experienced issues, including industries stretching from home security, banking, e-commerce and gaming.
The outage hit users on Monday and was linked to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides many companies with servers to run their apps and websites.
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Downdetector said it had received more than 6.5 million reports of problems from its users across the world.
The turmoil marked the largest internet disruption since last year's CrowdStrike malfunction disrupted technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports.
Systems on Monday gradually came back online from around 10am UK time, with AWS saying it had identified the source of the problem and was seeing "significant signs of recovery", but said it continued to "work through a backlog of queued requests".
What sites and apps were down?
According to Downdetector, dozens of popular sites, apps and platforms are having problems. Here is a list of those affected:
Snapchat
Slack
Amazon
Amazon Alexa
Amazon Alexa's website was down because of the outage. (PA)
Roblox
Wordle
Ring
Duolingo
Halifax
Lloyds Bank
Sky
PlayStation
The website for PlayStation was affected. (PA)
Gov.uk
Vodafone
Signal
Virgin Media
Bank of Scotland
Zoom
Clash Royale
Clash of Clans
Fortnite
Canva
PokemonGo
Peloton
Rocket League
What happened?
Thousands of web users began reporting issues to Downdetector from about 7.30am (2.30am ET) onwards on Monday.
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Some companies reported their problems were caused by an issue with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
In its first post about the issue on its health status page at 8.11am (3.11am ET), AWS said it was "investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services".
Later, at 10.01am (5.01am ET), it said it had "identified a potential root cause for error rates for the DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region", confirming 20 minutes later that it had applied "initial mitigations".
At 10.27am (5.27am ET), it said: "We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests. We will continue to provide additional information."
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At 12.35pm (7.35am ET), it said the "underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated" and that "most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now".
DNS stands for Domain Name System, essentially the phone book for the internet, which translates website names into numbers that can be understood by computers. If there are issues with DNS, it can mean browsers struggle to find affected websites.
While outages have passed their peak, disruption continued through the afternoon for users of some services. (Downdetector)
AWS later said it was still experiencing some "errors and connectivity issues across multiple services" and was putting in place limits on the number of requests that could be made on its platform to aid the recovery.
While some apps like Reddit and Roblox had largely stabilised, according to Downdetector, others, including Snapchat and Duolingo, were showing a resurgence in issues seen earlier in the day.
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On its status page, AWS said the problem emerged at its US-EAST-1 location in northern Virginia, its oldest and largest for web services, which previously suffered outages in 2021 and 2020.
Alan Woodward, professor of computing at the University of Surrey, said: "What this episode has highlighted is just how interdependent our infrastructure is.
"So many online services rely upon third parties for their physical infrastructure, and this shows that problems can occur in even the largest of those third-party providers. Small errors, often human made, can have widespread and significant impact."
In a letter to economic secretary to the Treasury, Lucy Rigby MP, the Treasury Committee asked if the Treasury was concerned that "seemingly key parts of our IT infrastructure are hosted abroad"?
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The committee of MPs also asked what work the Treasury is doing with HMRC, which it said may have been affected by the outages, to look at what went wrong and how to prevent such incidents in future.
What have the affected companies said?
While many platforms have come back online, Reddit was still reporting issues on Monday afternoon.
In a status update, it said that a "fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results".
Halifax apologised to customers for being unable to process requests, and in an update posted at around 1.35pm, said all of its services were "running as normal" again. Some customers were still reporting delays in sending payments, however.
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A HMRC spokesperson said customers were having problem accessing its online services as part of the AWS outage.
"We're working urgently with them on this matter. Our phone lines are currently busy as a result, so for anything that isn't urgent we recommend calling at a later time," they said.
The website for the Halifax bank went down. (PA)
They said later: "Customers can access our online services as normal, as the global issue which affected Amazon Web Services has now been resolved. We thank customers for their patience while the problem was being resolved."
A Lloyds Bank spokesperson apologised to customers on Monday morning and confirmed at around 1.30pm that "all of our services are now running as normal".
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Despite this, several customers complained on Lloyd's X account that they could not view updates on their accounts and that the bank's online payment services still were not working for them.
A spokesperson for VodafoneThree said that while Vodafone and Three networks are now "operating normally", some customers "may have difficulty accessing certain apps and websites due to a wider issue with Amazon Web Services".
"This is unrelated to our mobile networks. We are continuing to monitor the situation," it added.
Can I claim compensation?
Editor of Which? Money, Jenny Rose, said that banks "must ensure" customers are "swiftly compensated" for any loss incurred by customers resulting from Monday's technical issues.
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"Customers should keep evidence of impacted payments in case they need to make a claim, and in the meantime, anyone likely to miss important payments should contact the company involved to ensure they waive any fees," she wrote.
According to consumer service Join the Claim, banks are "not obligated to offer compensation for outages", but customers "may receive reimbursement for any fees or charges incurred due to the disruption".
"To pursue this, it's essential to provide evidence of the negative impact and file complaints directly with the bank," the group said following banking outages in February 2025.
"If unresolved, the Financial Ombudsman Service can offer further assistance."
What is Amazon Web Services?
Part of Amazon's cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides the infrastructure for the websites and apps of millions of companies.
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According to internet analytics experts BuiltWith, more than 76 million websites use AWS, meaning it essentially powers much of the internet.
It has the biggest share of its market, but competes against the likes of Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Companies rent computers and servers from AWS instead of building their own data hubs, making it a huge money spinner for Amazon - last year, AWS had a revenue of $107.6bn (£80.2bn).
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