On the morning of Monday, October 20th, 2025, a major internet outage originated from Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Northern Virginia, also known as the US-EAST-1 region. Many of these data centers are located in nearby Sterling or Ashburn, and these buildings are the backbone of thousands of apps and websites such as Slack, Zoom, and Canvas. This disruption affected many businesses and schools, rendering people unable to do their work at the start of the week.

“Cyber risk analytics firm CyberCube just released a preliminary insured loss estimate for AWS’ outage, projecting a loss of up to $581 million,” CRN Magazine said.

The problem started with a software bug in AWS’s automation for managing DNS. This is the system that translates website names (like www.jchsroundtablereview.com) into IP addresses that computers use to connect. Two parts of the system tried to update the same data at the same time, causing the DNS to temporarily lose information for a critical database service called DynamoDB. Without these records available, many apps couldn’t find their servers, causing them to slow down or stop working entirely.

Although AWS fixed the problem within hours, several AWS components still had backlogs to clear from the massive amount of requests they received during the downtime. This caused effects from the outage to last for a few more hours after the issue was resolved. Companies are now rethinking backup plans and multi-cloud strategies to make sure that one glitch in one region doesn’t disrupt the entire world again.