A DNS error appears to have been the culprit behind a major Amazon Web Services outage at its oldest and largest data center.
Early Monday morning, Amazon's AWS experienced an outage that brought down more than 100 of its services. Platforms like Snapchat, Reddit, and Venmo that use AWS for hosting servers and delivering content all suffered the impact, as did games like Roblox, Wordle, and Fortnite.
Based on the AWS service status page, the outage started with an error with its Domain Name System at Amazon's northern Virginia data plant, located in what is known as the "Data Center Alley," where hundreds of data centers are located.
At 6:53 p.m. ET, an update on the AWS Health Dashboard said the outage had been resolved by around 6 p.m. ET, and all 142 services that were down in the morning are running again.
According to Cloudflare, the DNS is essentially the internet's name-to-number translation system, which translates the domain name you type into the browser in human language to an IP address that contacts the server in a machine-friendly langauge. If the DNS is not working, a lookup takes too long and a website may timeout. For users, it could also seem like the website they're looking for no longer exists or simply can't be found.
Following the DNS failure, a domino effect of other issues followed, including issues with cloud computing service and Network Load Balancers, which route traffic between servers. This affected AWS services.
Millions of businesses rely on AWS, and the only two other cloud service providers of similar scale are Microsoft's Azure and Google's Cloud Platform.
While it is common for internet service providers to experience issues with DNS, due to the reach of AWS, the scale of disruption seen on Monday is rare. Other larger cloud providers have also undergone DNS-related outages in recent years. In 2021, Microsoft Azure experienced an DNS outage due to a spike in traffic, and so did Akamai Edge due to a bug in its DNS system. In July, Cloudflare's DNS resolver had an outage that the company said was caused by an internal misconfiguration.
Northern Virginia, where the malfunction happened, according to the AWS Health Dashboard, is a common spot for data centers.
Business Insider's Hannah Beckler reported earlier in October that Big Tech companies filed permits to build 54 new data centers in Virginia over the first nine months of 2025, with Amazon planning for most of the facilities, as well as some of the largest.
As of 2023, data centers in Virginia use up a quarter of the state's available electricity, and residents are increasingly concerned about how these constructions would impact their quality of life despite the promised tax revenue.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
