Global AWS outage: causes, impact, and estimated financial losses

On the morning of October 20, 2025, the world experienced one of the most significant digital disruptions in recent years after a major outage hit Amazon Web Services (AWS) – the backbone of global cloud infrastructure. The incident began around 9:00 a.m. local time in Italy and caused widespread service interruptions across hundreds of websites and online platforms worldwide.

The outage affected both consumer-facing applications and enterprise systems. According to DownDetector, disruptions were reported across Roblox, Clash Royale, Zoom, Canva, Snapchat. The outage also affected WhatsApp, OpenAI, Airbnb, Google, Vodafone, Intesa Sanpaolo, Poste Italiane, and other platforms. The cascading failure led to connectivity issues in Europe, the United States, and parts of Asia – underscoring the world’s deep dependency on a handful of cloud providers.

Amazon confirmed that the outage originated in the US-EAST-1 (Northern Virginia) region, one of its most critical global data hubs. The company attributed the failure to an error in the DNS resolution system for API endpoints, which triggered a malfunction in DynamoDB and caused cascading disruptions in related services, including IAM and global database tables. In its official statement, AWS reported “significant signs of recovery” within a few hours, though full service restoration took longer.

Preliminary estimates suggest the outage lasted about three hours. Based on annual revenue figures and assuming full downtime,

1. Roblox (annual revenue ~$3.6 billion) could have lost up to $1.2 million;
2. Clash Royale around $70,000;
3. Zoom about $1.5 million;
4. Canva roughly $1.1 million;
5. AWS itself up to $42 million

A more refined analysis, however, takes into account the partial accessibility of services and the rapid recovery of user activity. Under this approach, real losses are estimated at roughly 25% of the upper bound. This would translate to approximately $0.3 million for Roblox, $17,000 for Clash Royale, $0.4 million for Zoom, $0.28 million for Canva, and $10–11 million for AWS.

The outage once again highlighted the structural vulnerability of the global digital economy, heavily concentrated around a few major cloud providers. Each hour of downtime translates into millions in lost transactions, frozen advertising campaigns, and halted business operations.

The AWS incident serves as a reminder of the systemic risks of such concentration and the growing need for infrastructure diversification and digital resilience strategies. Analysts suggest that both corporations and governments will likely revisit their dependency on single-cloud ecosystems in the wake of this event.