AWS Outage Takes Down Snapchat, Robinhood, and Millions More

Amazon Web Services crashed this morning. Not a minor hiccup. A full-blown outage that took down Snapchat, Robinhood, Fortnite, and dozens of other apps used by millions of people worldwide.

The culprit? US-EAST-1, AWS's most critical data center region. The same region that's failed spectacularly in 2020, 2021, and 2023. Apparently, Amazon still hasn't learned its lesson.

What Went Down This Morning

AWS confirmed the disaster on its status page around 9:30 AM UTC on Monday, October 20, 2025. Their official statement was predictably vague. "We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region."

Translation: Everything is on fire, and we're scrambling to fix it.

Perplexity AI went completely dark. CEO Aravind Srinivas didn't sugarcoat it on X. "Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We're working on resolving it."

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase blamed AWS too. So did payment platform Venmo. Even Amazon's own services couldn't escape. Amazon.com, Prime Video, and Alexa all showed error pages according to Downdetector.

The Damage Report Gets Worse

The outage didn't discriminate. It hit consumer apps, financial platforms, gaming services, and enterprise tools all at once.

Snapchat users couldn't send messages. Robinhood traders couldn't access their portfolios during active market hours. Fortnite players got kicked mid-game. Imagine losing your crypto portfolio access while Bitcoin swings 5% in an hour.

Small businesses running on AWS infrastructure? Completely locked out of their own systems. Customer service teams couldn't respond to tickets. E-commerce stores couldn't process orders. SaaS companies watched their uptime guarantees evaporate.

AWS hasn't disclosed how many services failed. They haven't released numbers on affected customers. They haven't even admitted what caused the crash. Radio silence except for that bland status page update.

The US-EAST-1 Curse Strikes Again

US-EAST-1 isn't just any AWS region. It's the oldest and largest data center cluster in Amazon's global network. Located in Northern Virginia, it hosts a massive chunk of the internet's infrastructure.

It's also a ticking time bomb.

This region has a documented history of catastrophic failures. December 2020: A major outage took down Netflix, Disney+, and Ring doorbells. December 2021: Another failure killed Fortnite, Valorant, and League of Legends during peak gaming hours. June 2023: Yet another crash disrupted thousands of services.

Why does US-EAST-1 keep failing? The region is overloaded. Too many customers. Too much legacy infrastructure. Too many dependencies on aging systems that can't handle modern cloud demands.

Amazon knows this. Everyone in the industry knows this. But migrating away from US-EAST-1 is expensive and complicated. So companies keep using it, hoping they won't be the next victim.

What This Really Means for Cloud Dependency

Today's outage exposed the terrifying fragility of cloud infrastructure. A single region failure at AWS doesn't just affect one company or one service. It cascades across the entire internet.

AWS controls roughly 32% of the global cloud market. When they stumble, millions of users feel it instantly. No backup. No failover. Just broken apps and angry customers.

The technical details? Still unknown. AWS hasn't disclosed whether this was a networking failure, a power issue, or a software bug. They haven't said if it was human error or a system malfunction.

This opacity is standard practice for AWS. They'll eventually publish a post-mortem report buried deep in their developer documentation. By then, everyone will have moved on to the next crisis.

Meanwhile, businesses are doing the math. How much revenue did they lose? How many customers switched to competitors? What's the point of paying for 99.99% uptime guarantees when AWS can't deliver?

The Multi-Cloud Migration Nobody Wants to Make

Smart companies don't put all their infrastructure in one cloud provider. They split workloads across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. They build redundancy. They prepare for exactly this scenario.

But multi-cloud architecture is expensive and complex. It requires duplicate infrastructure, additional engineering resources, and sophisticated orchestration tools. Small startups and mid-sized businesses can't afford it.

So they stay on AWS. They hope for the best. They cross their fingers that US-EAST-1 won't crash during their peak traffic hours.

Today proved that hope isn't a strategy.

The outage will fuel debates about cloud concentration risk. Regulators will ask uncomfortable questions about whether tech giants like Amazon have too much control over critical internet infrastructure. Enterprise customers will demand better transparency and accountability.

Nothing will fundamentally change. AWS will issue apologies. They'll promise improvements. They'll add more redundancy. And then US-EAST-1 will crash again in 18 months.

Bottom Line: Your Cloud Strategy Needs a Backup Plan

AWS proved once again that even the biggest cloud providers aren't invincible.

If your business runs entirely on AWS, you're gambling with uptime. If you're hosting everything in US-EAST-1, you're playing Russian roulette with customer data.

The solution isn't abandoning AWS. It's building real redundancy. Distribute workloads across multiple regions. Maintain critical services on different providers. Have actual disaster recovery plans that don't assume AWS will always work.

Because as today showed, it won't. And the next outage might last hours instead of minutes. By then, your competitors who invested in redundancy will be stealing your customers while your apps show error messages.

The internet's infrastructure is more fragile than anyone wants to admit. Plan accordingly.

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