[German]On October 20, 2025, an outage of Amazon Web Service servers in Virginia (USA) killed nearly half of the web, due to a single point of failure. I got informed by a German reader at 9:30 a.m. CET about an issue. It's now clear, that Atlassian services, Amazon Web Services, Autodesk, Signal, and many more depending services are also affected. Nearly the half of the Internet seems down and can't be uses.
A reader's tip
A German blog reader contacted me this morning by email and asked "Amazon down?" . He wrote, that Signal messenger service definitely wasn't working for him; no messages were going out. But even so, it was still stuck. He suspects that the problem lies with AWS.
Signal is experiencing problems
The Signal statuspage says they are "running and up". At around 9:36 a.m. CET, I tried to send a message via Signal. It was "apparently" sent, but nothing arrived on the recipient's smartphone—instead, I was informed that "there may be messages waiting."
When attempting to retrieve the Signal messages, the smartphone gets stuck on the progress bar shown above and does not receive anything.
The platform allestoerungen.de shows that problems appear to have started at around 9:00 a.m. – over 1,200 reports per time unit indicate that quite a few people are affected. A good 66% of users complain that they are unable to send messages. Seven percent of those reporting problems are not receiving any Signal messages, and 27% of users report problems with the server connection.
Widespread global disruption
I quickly checked X to see what was being reported there. m4rio also complains that the Signal status page does not show any disruption, but he is getting a message that the network connection is disrupted and that he needs to check it.
In the second tweet captured in the screenshot, Tryaz Gaming posted an overview showing that a large number of services are currently experiencing disruptions. This includes Amazon. Confirmation of this can be found at downdetector.com or allestoerungen.de. It is now becoming clear that there is a major AWS outage in the US. The AWS status page states:
Oct 20 12:11 AM PDT We are investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region. We will provide another update in the next 30-45 minutes.
and later an update mentions "Operational issue – Multiple services (N. Virginia)":
Increased Error Rates and Latencies
Oct 20 12:51 AM PDT We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. This issue may also be affecting Case Creation through the AWS Support Center or the Support API. We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause. We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share
The Amazon DynamoDB service is said to be affected, and many other AWS services are also impacted. The AWS outage is causing other services that rely on AWS to fail. Amazon, Xbox, Roblox, Snapchat, Playstation Network (PSN), EPIC Games, and many other services are affected. Later the following messages has been published.
Oct 20 3:03 AM PDT We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS Services. We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered. We continue to work towards full resolution and will provide updates as we have more information to share.
Oct 20 2:27 AM PDT 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.
Oct 20 2:22 AM PDT We have applied initial mitigations and we are observing early signs of recovery for some impacted AWS Services. During this time, requests may continue to fail as we work toward full resolution. We recommend customers retry failed requests. While requests begin succeeding, there may be additional latency and some services will have a backlog of work to work through, which may take additional time to fully process. We will continue to provide updates as we have more information to share, or by 3:15 AM.
Oct 20 2:01 AM PDT We have identified a potential root cause for error rates for the DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region. Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1. We are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery. This issue also affects other AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. Global services or features that rely on US-EAST-1 endpoints such as IAM updates and DynamoDB Global tables may also be experiencing issues. During this time, customers may be unable to create or update Support Cases. We recommend customers continue to retry any failed requests. We will continue to provide updates as we have more information to share, or by 2:45 AM.
This case once again highlights the dependencies that exist in IT. It affects many services and software.
Autodesk is affected
German users told in comments to the German edition of this blog post, that they can't use this software. The license servers are not reachable.
Atlassian also affected
Also German blog readers mentioned that services from Atlassian – including the ticket system – are affected. A blog reader has sent me the following screenshot (thanks).
Here in Germany other services in the health care sector are also affected.
