Major internet outage hits websites, apps and Lloyds Bank after issue at Amazon Web Services – business live

🔍 What happened

* On 20 October 2025, AWS experienced a major global outage, with thousands of users reporting disruptions across multiple services.

* According to monitoring site Downdetector, more than ~15,000 users were impacted globally.

* AWS itself acknowledged “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US‑EAST‑1 Region.”

* Many major apps and platforms that rely on AWS were affected, including Snapchat, Fortnite, Duolingo, Ring, and the AI platform Perplexity (whose CEO confirmed the root issue was AWS‑based).

* The region most impacted appears to be US‑East‑1 (Northern Virginia) which is AWS’s major hub, and disruptions there tend to ripple widely.

✅ Why this matters

* AWS is a critical backbone for many internet services—both major consumer apps and enterprise platforms rely on it. A region disruption therefore can lead to a cascade of failures.

* This outage illustrates how concentrated dependency on a single region or set of services can raise risk—even for large companies.

* For businesses or developers using AWS (or any cloud provider), this is a reminder of the importance of designing for redundancy, distributing loads across regions, having backup plans for cloud‑vendor failures.

* End users may see widespread impacts: inability to log in, failure of app features, service degradation, etc. If you rely on a platform that is impacted, customer experience can suffer.

⚠️ Some additional details / caveats

1. AWS has not (in the sources I saw) given a full public post‑mortem yet with root cause, timeline for full recovery, or detailed breakdown by service. The situation is “developing.” The Verge+1

2. While the reports are of “thousands” or “tens of thousands” of users, the actual scope (in terms of business impact, revenue loss, time offline, etc.) may be much larger and slower to quantify.

3. Historical context: AWS has had past outages (especially in US‑East‑1 region) which similarly affected many customers—so while serious, this is not unprecedented.