A catastrophic Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage sent shockwaves through the digital world, disrupting thousands of websites and apps, including major platforms like Apple TV, Canva, Fortnite, Reddit, Snapchat, and Starbucks. Coinciding with India’s Diwali celebrations, the outage severely impacted e-commerce businesses running festive promotions, halting transactions and user engagement during a peak shopping period. According to Downdetector, the outage began at 4 a.m. ET (1:30 p.m. IST), peaked with over 13,000 user reports by 8 a.m. ET (5:30 p.m. IST), and persisted until 2 p.m. ET (11:30 p.m. IST). While some services recovered earlier, full restoration took nearly 12 hours, marking one of the largest internet disruptions since the 2024 CrowdStrike-Microsoft incident.

The outage’s ripple effects were profound, exposing the fragility of global reliance on AWS’s cloud infrastructure. Users reported widespread issues: Fire TV users couldn’t stream content, Fortnite and Roblox players faced server crashes, Snapchat’s messaging and stories stalled, and even Starbucks’ mobile app faltered, alongside disruptions to government agencies. In India, Diwali-driven online sales suffered as platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, and Myntra saw checkout failures and sluggish performance. The scale of the outage, affecting critical services and amplifying financial losses, has prompted estimates of billions in economic impact, though precise figures remain under assessment due to the outage’s extensive reach across industries.

AWS identified the root cause as a Domain Name System (DNS) resolution issue affecting DynamoDB service endpoints in the US-East-1 region, triggering elevated error rates and latencies. This cascaded into impairments in EC2 subsystems and Network Load Balancer health checks, paralyzing dependent services like CloudFront and EventBridge. AWS engineers worked feverishly, restoring most services by 3:01 p.m. PT (6:01 p.m. ET), though some, like AWS Config, faced lingering backlogs. The company committed to releasing a detailed post-event analysis, aiming to address vulnerabilities and prevent future disruptions of this magnitude.

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The outage sparked intense debate about the risks of centralized cloud dependency. X CTO Elon Musk seized the moment to criticize Signal’s downtime, tweeting, “Signal went down with AWS—time for X Chat,” while promoting his platform’s independence. Industry experts echoed concerns, with analysts like Cornell’s Ken Birman urging businesses to adopt multi-cloud strategies to mitigate such risks. As AWS commands over 30% of the cloud market, this “Diwali blackout” underscores the urgent need for diversified infrastructure and robust failover systems to safeguard global digital ecosystems against future outages.

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