Early this morning, Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a major outage in its US-EAST-1 region, brought down services across finance, gaming, media, and the crypto industry. Platforms including Coinbase, Robinhood, Snapchat, and Fortnite were inaccessible, triggering a cascade of online disruptions worldwide.
In Brief
- AWS’s US-EAST-1 region suffered a significant outage starting 6:40 a.m. ET on October 20, 2025, impacting numerous web services globally.
- Major crypto platforms like Coinbase and Robinhood reported full disruptions, highlighting centralization risks for digital assets.
- Experts warn the incident underscores global over-reliance on single cloud providers, with AWS expecting gradual recovery within hours.
The digital pulse of a significant portion of the internet flatlined today, October 20, 2025, as a major outage at Amazon Web Services’ critical US-EAST-1 data center sent ripples of disruption across online services worldwide. Starting at approximately 6:40 a.m. ET, the incident, which saw over 15,000 user reports flood Downdetector by mid-morning, starkly illustrates the profound, centralized dependency of the modern digital economy on a few cloud giants.
Global Infrastructure Cripples as World Experiences AWS Outage
Amazon Web Services, which powers about one-third of the world’s cloud computing, acknowledged the issue on its status dashboard at 12:11 a.m. ET. The company stated, “We are experiencing increased error rates and latency in the US-EAST-1 Region.”
AWS added it has “identified a potential root cause” and is “actively mitigating the issue” through a root cause analysis. A detailed post-mortem report is expected within 48 hours.
AWS reports services are “gradually coming back online,” though no exact timeline for full recovery has been confirmed. The outage remains contained to the US-EAST-1 region, not a full global shutdown.
Crypto and Blockchain Services Face Acute Disruption Amid AWS Outage
Crypto and financial services, heavily reliant on AWS for trading engines and wallets, faced acute disruptions. Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange, reported full downtime for trading, deposits, and withdrawals, attributing it directly to “an AWS outage in US-EAST-1.”
Coinbase Support quickly tweeted, emphasizing, “All funds are safe,” but urged users to retry later. Trading volume on the platform halted for approximately four hours, per on-chain analytics from CryptoQuant, though core networks like Ethereum and Bitcoin, running on decentralized infrastructure, remained unaffected.
Similarly, Robinhood, the popular stock and crypto trading app, experienced login failures and order execution delays, citing AWS as the cause, impacting crypto trades for pairs like BTC/ETH. Other centralized applications in the blockchain space, such as the AI-driven blockchain query service Perplexity AI, also went offline.
While exchanges like Kraken reported minor latency, they largely remained operational by leveraging other regions. Overall, an estimated 20% of US crypto trading volume was paused. No fund losses have been confirmed; all impacts stem from service unavailability, not security breaches.
Key Services Impacted Across the Digital Economy
Beyond crypto, the AWS outage in US-EAST-1 caused cascading failures across a broad spectrum of online services. Core AWS services directly affected included Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which saw partial degradation in API calls and instance launches, and Amazon DynamoDB, which experienced full disruption in read/write operations.
CloudFront, AWS’s content delivery network, also faced intermittent edge location issues. In total, 14 AWS services were directly impacted per initial AWS reporting.
This disrupted numerous consumer-facing platforms. Roblox game servers went offline, Fortnite and the Epic Games Store suffered login and matchmaking failures, and streaming giants like Prime Video and Disney+ reported playback errors.
Social media applications like Snapchat experienced crashes, while productivity tools like Canva and Duolingo saw syncing and accessibility issues. Even everyday services like Venmo, with payment processing delays, and the McDonald’s app, with order placement failures, were affected.
Historical Context and Expert Warnings
Major AWS regional outages occur roughly once or twice a year, often stemming from configuration errors rather than hardware failures.
- June 13, 2023: due to a networking fault in Amazon VPC. It was mostly resolved within 2.5 hours for core services.
- December 7, 2021: Kinesis outage lasted 2.5 hours
- February 28, 2017: S3 outage extended over 12 hours, representing one of AWS’s longest.
Experts emphasize infrastructure fragility over malicious intent. Kevin Mitnick Jr., Senior Analyst at CloudSec Research, stated, “This is consistent with a regional infrastructure failure. There’s no indication this was a cyberattack, but given rising geopolitical tensions, the investigation will be thorough.”
Chain Street’s Take: Centralization Risks in a Decentralized Vision
Today’s AWS outage serves as a stark reminder of the inherent paradox at the heart of much of the digital economy: an industry often championing decentralization, yet profoundly reliant on highly centralized cloud infrastructure.
While core blockchain networks are designed for resilience, their centralized on-ramps and off-ramps remain vulnerable.
The outage served as a wake-up call for investors, analysts, and developers alike. Building true resilience in the digital economy now means adopting multi-cloud setups, spreading workloads across regions, and rethinking where key parts of the crypto infrastructure live. Depending too heavily on one cloud provider, no matter how dominant, runs counter to the decentralized principles the industry was built on.
