Why one cloud outage takes down half the Internet
The AWS outage of October 2025: why your doorbell, your bank and your game stopped together
On 20 October 2025, a video doorbell, a bank app and an online game stopped within minutes of each other. Three companies with nothing in common, and one thing they all shared.
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Monday, 20 October 2025, just before eight in the morning in London. Three apps on your phone stop at once: your doorbell camera, your bank, your game. Three companies with nothing in common.
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Then your phone rings, and it is worse: you run the ticket app of a small island ferry, and at the dock, Rono, the captain, cannot check a single ticket. Miva, who takes the ferry to work every morning, waits with the others.
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It is not only you. All day long, people report apps that stopped: Snapchat, Fortnite, Roblox, Ring doorbells, banks such as Lloyds and Halifax. More than 17 million reports, the most of the whole year.
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Like your app, each of them runs on computers rented from a cloud provider, a company with huge buildings full of computers. And that morning, each of them needed the same one, directly or through a service it uses: Amazon Web Services, AWS.
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Yet AWS has buildings all over the world. The trouble started in just one place, and a doorbell, a bank and a game far away stopped all the same.
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Go further
Two words worth knowing from this morning.