When the internet goes down, business stops. That’s exactly what happened early in the morning on October 20, 2025, when Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a massive outage that disrupted a huge portion of the online world.

Popular platforms like Snapchat, Duolingo, Zoom, Venmo, Coinbase, and even Amazon’s own retail systems went down for hours. Thousands of businesses — big and small — were left scrambling.

This wasn’t a cyberattack. It was a technical failure inside AWS’s infrastructure in its critical US-East-1 region in Northern Virginia — one of the busiest data hubs on the planet. A DNS issue at the heart of AWS caused the domino effect.

What Actually Happened

The outage began just after 3 a.m. Eastern Time. Engineers eventually traced the root of the problem to a DNS resolution failure. In simple terms, DNS is like the internet’s phone book — it helps computers find each other. When you type in a website name, DNS tells your browser where to go to load that page.

When AWS’s DNS went down, services that rely on it couldn’t find the right addresses. It was like trying to call someone after their number was suddenly erased from the phone book.

This DNS failure affected core AWS tools like EC2 (virtual servers) and DynamoDB (a database service), which many global platforms depend on. As a result, error messages and slow performance rippled across the web.

Why It Caused So Much Disruption

Most of today’s digital world runs on the cloud. And a huge amount of it runs specifically on AWS. When a single regional hub — like US-East-1 — goes down, it’s not just Amazon that suffers. Thousands of businesses that rely on AWS for their websites, apps, and backend systems also go dark.

This single point of failure revealed something important: too many businesses rely on a single cloud provider or service. When that service fails, everything stops.

What Could Have Been Done Differently

While the specific DNS change shouldn’t have had such a wide impact, this outage highlighted how critical it is to build resilience into your digital systems. If businesses had backup hosting or a multi-platform strategy in place, they could have stayed partially or fully online during the outage.

Having redundant systems means if one platform or data center goes down, another can step in to keep your website and essential services running. That’s the difference between staying open for business or being a “fish out of water” when outages hit.

A Simple Explanation of DNS

Think of DNS like a phone book or a GPS. When you type a web address into your browser, DNS tells your computer exactly where to go to find that website. If DNS breaks, your browser doesn’t know where to go — even if the website itself is perfectly fine.

That’s why DNS reliability is so important. If a main DNS system fails, it can bring down thousands of websites all at once.

How Maryland Web Design Protects Your Online Presence

At Maryland Web Design, we don’t rely on a single point of failure. Our hosting strategy includes redundant systems, multiple data centers, and proactive monitoring to minimize downtime. If one system falters, another automatically picks up the load.

We also help clients spread out their online marketing and hosting strategy, so they’re not tied to just one platform. That means if a major provider like AWS experiences problems, your business can keep running.

👉 Learn more about our hosting and protection strategy

The Takeaway

The October 2025 AWS outage is a wake-up call for every business that relies on the web to operate. Outages will happen. What matters is whether your business is prepared.

• Use multiple platforms where it makes sense.

• Build redundancy into your hosting.

• Protect your website, data, and digital marketing efforts from unexpected downtime.

At Maryland Web Design, we build your digital infrastructure like it matters — because it does. Let’s make sure your business never has to pause when the rest of the internet goes dark.

👉 Secure your hosting with Maryland Web Design