Widespread Internet Disruption Affects Major Platforms
A significant internet outage has impacted dozens of major websites and applications, with services including Perplexity, Signal, Coinbase, Amazon, Roblox, and Atlassian experiencing widespread disruptions. According to reports, the issues began around 8 am on October 20, affecting users across multiple platforms simultaneously. The outage represents one of the most substantial internet infrastructure failures in recent months.
AWS Infrastructure Issues Identified as Primary Cause
Sources indicate that the widespread disruptions link directly to problems at Amazon Web Services, which provides the critical infrastructure supporting much of the modern internet. AWS confirmed “significant error rates” through its health dashboard, identifying the core issue as related to “DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1.” The report states that this problem also affects other AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region, along with global services relying on its US-EAST-1 endpoints.
Analysts suggest that the concentration of critical services on Amazon Web Services infrastructure creates systemic vulnerability when regional issues occur. The current outage follows a similar pattern to previous disruptions where single points of failure in cloud infrastructure cascaded across multiple platforms.
Platform Responses and Service Impact
Company executives from affected platforms quickly acknowledged the disruptions and pointed to AWS as the root cause. “Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it,” stated the AI search engine startup’s CEO Aravind Srinivas in a post on X.
Similarly, Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal Foundation, confirmed in her social media post that “We are aware that Signal is down for some people. This appears to be related to a major AWS outage.” The disruption affected critical communication platforms alongside major financial and entertainment services including Coinbase and Roblox.
Monitoring Platform Data Shows Widespread Impact
The popular crowdsourced disruption reporting platform Downdetector recorded a significant spike in user reports, with nearly 50 websites experiencing heightened outage reports over several hours. At the peak of the incident, according to the analysis, Downdetector recorded approximately 15,000 incident reports related to the AWS disruption. Real-time tracking available through Downdetector’s live service status showed the geographic spread and severity of the service interruptions.
AWS Services Themselves Affected by Outage
The infrastructure provider’s own services suffered significant disruption, with 37 AWS services impacted according to company updates. Affected services ranged from AWS Systems Manager and Network Firewall to the Support Center itself. “During this time, customers may be unable to create or update support cases,” one of the status updates indicated, complicating resolution efforts for dependent services.
Context of Recent Cloud Infrastructure Vulnerabilities
This major outage occurs just months after a significant disruption at Google Cloud affected platforms including OpenAI, Spotify, and Google’s own services such as Gmail and Google Drive. Analysts suggest these recurring incidents highlight the concentrated risk in modern cloud infrastructure architecture. The current AWS disruption also reportedly affected IT service management company Cloudflare, which supports approximately 24 million websites according to industry estimates.
The pattern of cascading failures across major platforms raises questions about infrastructure resilience and redundancy in an increasingly centralized internet ecosystem. Meanwhile, technology companies continue aggressive investment in cloud computing capabilities despite these demonstrated vulnerabilities in current infrastructure models.
This article aggregates information from publicly available sources. All trademarks and copyrights belong to their respective owners.
Note: Featured image is for illustrative purposes only and does not represent any specific product, service, or entity mentioned in this article.
