In a major incident early Monday (October 20, 2025), cloud-computing giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a widespread service outage centred on its US-EAST-1 region, disrupting a swathe of websites, apps and services worldwide, including Pakistan.
What happened
According to AWS’s status page, the company reported “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region”.
The outage began around 3 a.m. ET (United States) and rapidly manifested globally: monitoring site Downdetector recorded large spikes in service-error reports for many consumer platforms.
Services impacted
Numerous high-profile platforms and services were affected:
- Social media/messaging: Snapchat, Signal
- Gaming: Fortnite, Roblox
- Finance/cryptocurrency: Coinbase, Venmo, Robinhood
- Amazon’s own services: Alexa, Prime Video, the main Amazon shopping site
- Banking/government institutions: UK’s HMRC (tax authority), and some banks like Lloyds Bank and Bank of Scotland reported problems.
Why it matters
AWS is a backbone of internet infrastructure: companies large and small depend on its cloud-services for computing, storage, and routing. When AWS fails, the impact cascades.
For Pakistani users and businesses that rely on AWS-based platforms, the outage would have caused service interruptions, slower response times or full unavailability.
Current status
AWS reported signs of recovery later Monday: “We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests.”
However, the full root-cause was not immediately disclosed, and some services may continue experiencing latency or backlog-effects.
Key take-aways
- The outage reinforces how reliant the online world is on a handful of cloud-providers.
- Businesses should review their architectures for resilience (e.g., multi-region, multi-cloud fallbacks).
- The incident may prompt fresh urgency for firms, including in Pakistan, to ensure continuity in case of cloud-provider downtime.
- AWS has committed to issuing a public “Post-Event Summary” where significant impact occurred.
While there’s no detailed breakdown yet of how Pakistani services were impacted, given the global scope of the outage, it is likely that users of AWS-based SaaS, fintech or e-commerce services in Pakistan experienced degraded performance or temporary unavailability. Local tech firms will need to assess their exposure and incident-response readiness.
