This morning of October 20, thousands of Internet users saw their favorite platforms fall one after the other. Video games, social networks, applications… everything seems to have stopped working suddenly. At the origin of this immense outage: a failure of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the invisible backbone of half of the Internet.
AWS Outage Paralyzes Global Internet
From 8 a.m. (French time), reports began to flood in on social networks and Down Detector. Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, Steam, Epic Games, EA, Ubisoft… all inaccessible. On the entertainment side, it was chaos: Fortnite, Rocket League, Fall Guys, Roblox, Max, Snapchat, Canva, Duolingo and Rate My Professor all displayed errors or did not load.
On or “IT’S REALLY CRAZY 😭”. One user even listed: “Canva is down, Rate My Professor is down, Fortnite is down, Duolingo is down, Snapchat is down, Rocket League is down, Robinhood is down, Max is down, Xbox is down, and Steam is down.”
Faced with the scale of the problem, all eyes have turned to AWS, Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, used by the majority of technology companies to run their services.
Why did all these services go down at once?
According to the official Amazon Web Services page, the outage was located in the US-EAST-1 region, United States. It specifically concerned a DNS resolution problem related to endpointsDynamoDB APIa database used in real time by many services.
AWS confirmed: “We are investigating increased error rates and latencies for several AWS services in the US-EAST-1 region.” A little later, the platform indicated that it had “identified a potential root cause for DynamoDB API error rates” and that it was working on “multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery”.
In other words: a failure in the translation of addresses on the DNS servers prevented several applications and games from working. And since AWS is the infrastructure provider for services as varied as Fortnite, PlayStation or Roblox, the impact was global.
Update on the situation, what is working again (or not)
As we write these lines, some services are starting to return to normal. Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network seem accessible for some users, but malfunctions persist for others, a sign that the recovery is progressive and incomplete.
Amazon has triggered its emergency recovery protocols and is attempting to restore all impacted services, but no official estimate of full resolution has been given.
While waiting, the best thing to do is to wait and avoid overloading the servers with repeated connection attempts. For users, it’s a stark but useful reminder that even tech giants rely on fragile infrastructure, and a single outage can cause a chain reaction of global magnitude.