AWS Outage Knocks Out Snapchat, Reddit, Major Banks – 150 M Users Impacted

On Monday, October 20, 2025, at 17:00 UTC, a massive AWS outage sent shockwaves through the internet, taking Snapchat, Reddit, and a host of banking apps offline in a matter of minutes. The disruption originated in the US‑EAST‑1 (Northern Virginia) region of Amazon Web Services, the cloud backbone that powers everything from social media to financial services. By 20:00 UTC, more than 150 million users across three continents were staring at error screens, while analysts warned of a multimillion‑dollar hit during the crucial pre‑Black Friday period.

What Went Wrong and Why

The AWS Health Dashboard first flagged “increased error rates” for EC2, S3, CloudFront, and Route 53 at 16:55 UTC. Within ten minutes, error rates had surged past 40 %, and by 17:20 UTC roughly 85 % of customers in the affected region were unable to reach their services. According to Network World’s senior editor Timothy Greene, the root cause appears to be a mis‑configured BGP routing update rolled out during routine maintenance. The error rippled across the region’s backbone, effectively severing the data highways that many apps rely on.

When the problem surfaced, Adam Selipsky, AWS’s chief executive, issued a statement at 18:45 UTC acknowledging the incident and confirming that the highest‑priority incident response team was on the line. "We’re aware of the issue impacting multiple AWS services in the US‑EAST‑1 region and have assembled our highest‑priority incident response team," he said, adding that traffic was being rerouted where possible.

Scope and Scale of the Outage

Downdetector, the outage‑tracking site based in Saint‑Raphaël, France, logged 1,247,853 user‑reported issues for Snapchat, 985,421 for Reddit, and 678,302 for various banking applications by 20:00 UTC. The bulk of reports came from North America (78 %), with Europe accounting for 19 % and Asia‑Pacific 3 %.

Cloudflare’s global outage dashboard estimated that the United States alone saw 62 million users lose connectivity, the United Kingdom 28 million, and Germany 15 million. In total, roughly 150 million people – nearly twice the population of Brazil – were caught in the digital blackout.

• Start time: 17:00 UTC (US‑EAST‑1 region)
• Affected services: EC2, S3, CloudFront, Route 53
• Top‑reported apps: Snapchat, Reddit, major bank mobile apps
• Geographic impact: 78 % North America, 19 % Europe, 3 % APAC
• Estimated resolution: 23:00 UTC (still pending)

Responses from the Affected Companies

At 17:15 UTC, Snapchat posted on its official Twitter account @SnapchatHelp: "We're experiencing an issue with our service due to an external provider. We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible." The company’s CEO, Evan Spiegel, later said in a brief interview that the outage was “outside our direct control” and that engineers were in constant contact with AWS.

Reddit’s response came a whisker later. At 17:30 UTC, spokesperson Jessica McKinney tweeted, "We're investigating an issue that's affecting access to Reddit. We'll share updates here as soon as we have them." CEO Steve Huffman, speaking with the press, likened the experience to “trying to read a book with the pages glued together.”

Banking giants were not spared. JPMorgan Chase & Co. reported mobile app disruptions at 17:05 UTC, with CEO Jamie Dimon confirming that customers were seeing “login failures and delayed transaction updates.” Bank of America and Barclays echoed the sentiment, each posting alerts on their official channels and urging users to try again later.

Economic Impact and Expert Analysis

Gartner analyst Sid Nag warned at 19:20 UTC that the "economic ripple effects will be severe, particularly for e‑commerce platforms that rely on AWS for Black Friday preparation during this critical pre‑holiday period." Using AWS’s 2024 Q3 revenue of $25.7 billion, he projected a loss of roughly $142,000 per minute for customers still stuck in outage mode.

By contrast, the Ponemon Institute’s 2022 study of the December 7 2021 AWS outage pegged the cost of downtime at $1.5 billion overall. If the current incident stretches to the projected 6‑hour mark, the immediate hit could top $50 million – not counting the longer‑term brand damage to the affected services.

Road to Recovery and Future Safeguards

Deepak Singh, AWS’s Vice President of Infrastructure Engineering, is leading the Incident Response Team. By 19:55 UTC the AWS Health Dashboard indicated that the team was working with network carrier AT&T Corporation to reroute traffic and restore BGP stability. The updated ETA for full service is 23:00 UTC, though Selipsky cautioned that “full restoration may take several hours.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issued a NOTAM at 18:15 UTC warning of potential impacts on airline reservation systems. So far, no flight cancellations have been reported, but the notice underscores how intertwined cloud infrastructure has become with critical national services.

Under AWS’s Service Level Agreement, customers who experience more than four hours of downtime are eligible for a 100 % service credit. That clause is expected to trigger soon, offering some financial relief to the impacted enterprises.

Background on Major AWS Outages

Since its 2006 debut, Amazon Web Services has become the cloud workhorse for over 1 million active customers, including 90 % of Fortune 500 firms. However, it’s not immune to glitches. The March 1 2017 S3 glitch cost businesses about $150 million per hour, and the December 7 2021 incident affected 120 million users for nearly five hours.

In total, AWS has logged twelve major outages since 2017. Each event has prompted tighter engineering controls and more robust routing redundancies – yet the October 20 incident shows that even “routine” maintenance can snowball into a global crisis when a single BGP misconfiguration slips through.