Chicago – October 21, 2025
A massive outage at Amazon Web Services disrupted major websites and apps on Monday, in a show of how one company’s online infrastructure has become essential for many modern businesses to function.
Amazon said it was fixing the problem, but some disruptions were still ongoing as of Monday evening.
Tech experts tell NPR the incident highlights just how vulnerable companies are to these kinds of outages.
Here’s what to know about what happened and why a single outage could be so damaging.
The outage started early Monday
Amazon reported “increased error rates and latencies” starting around 3 a.m. ET that involved its facility in Northern Virginia.
Users reported trouble with popular websites and apps including Duolingo and the online games Roblox and Fortnite. Financial service companies like Coinbase, Robinhood and Venmo also reported disruptions, as did the companies that operate the chatbots Perplexity and ChatGPT. Amazon said its main website was affected. United Airlines, Canva, Reddit and Flickr also acknowledged problems with their websites. The Associated Press, NPR and The New York Times‘ Games also said they had issues.
Amazon said late Monday that it was making “progress” to restoring full functionality.
