Amazon has restored its cloud service after an outage that affected customers around the world
Investors have been lenient on AWS' problems: they're more concerned about Amazon's lag in AI and the stock's weak performance this year
Amazon's cloud service is back to normal after a failed update led to the biggest internet outage of 2025. Amazon's cloud is the world's most in-demand cloud service. However, investors waiting for the tech giant's third-quarter report were not concerned about the problems.
Details
It took Amazon more than 13 hours to fix the major consequences of a massive cloud services outage that caused global disruptions to thousands of websites and affected millions of users on October 20, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing a company statement. According to Reuters, it was the largest Internet outage since last year's CrowdStrike failed patch incident, which knocked out about 10 million Windows computers, paralyzing technology systems at hospitals, banks and airports.
Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit and Amazon.com were inaccessible to many users. The problems also affected customers of financial companies such as Fidelity, Coinbase, Robinhood and Venmo. The disruption affected messengers Signal and Slack, airlines including United Airlines, AI tool Perplexity, and video games Fortnite and Roblox. Lyft, a competitor of Uber, was also disrupted in the US. In the UK, the outage affected Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland and telecom providers Vodafone and BT. The website of HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) was also affected, Reuters reports.
How it all began
The outage began around 3:00 a.m. local time on October 20 following a technical update to a widely used Amazon Web Services (AWS) database service, DynamoDB. The patch, which contained incorrect Domain Name System (DNS) records, caused a database outage at the company's mission-critical data centers in Northern Virginia, which serve much of the U.S. East Coast. Because of problems with DynamoDB, other AWS services also began to fail, WSJ writes.
How the market reacted
The news of the glitch brought down Amazon's shares on the premarket. However, at the main trading on October 20, they showed strong growth. At the end of the trading day, the company's securities rose by 1.6%, outperforming all three major U.S. indices - the S&P 500, Dow Jones and the technological Nasdaq Composite.
The rise in Amazon's stock price suggests that investors are not overly concerned about the failure, MarketWatch states. Far more important to Wall Street is the ability of Amazon's cloud division to accelerate its growth and shake off its reputation for falling behind in the artificial intelligence race, the publication notes. Investors were disappointed by AWS's 18% growth rate in the second quarter.
Amazon shares are down 1.3% since the start of 2025, the worst performance in the Magnificent Seven. The tech giant will report its third-quarter results on October 30.
This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor
