Feed: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics
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Title: Amazon says automation bug caused massive AWS outage

Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2025 13:30:28 +0000
Link: https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/amazon-says...

Amazon has published a lengthy report about the outage that knocked numerous
websites, services, apps and games offline on October 20. It all started with
a bug in its automation software DynamoDB, where its AWS customers store
their data, which then triggered more issues in its other systems that relied
on the software.

As Amazon explains, DynamoDB maintains hundreds of thousands of DNS records
and is supposed to be able to fix any issue automatically. But on October 20,
the DynamoDB DNS management system suffered from a bug that resulted in an
empty DNS record for Amazon's data centers in North Virginia. DynamoDB was
supposed to repair the issue on its own, but it had failed to do so,
prompting Amazon to fix the problem manually. While the issue was happening,
all systems that needed to connect to DynamoDB couldn't and experienced DNS
failures, including the customers of its cloud computing services. It felt
like half the internet wasn't working when that happened.

The websites and services affected by the outage include Amazon itself,
Amazon Alexa devices, Bank of America, Snapchat, Canva, Reddit, Apple Music,
Apple TV, Lyft, Duolingo, Fortnite, Disney+, Venmo, Doordash, Hulu,
PlayStation and even Eight Sleep, whose beds connect to the internet to
adjust their temperature and incline. Some of them were slow to respond,
while others were completely inaccessible.

"We apologize for the impact this event caused our customers. While we have a
strong track record of operating our services with the highest levels of
availability, we know how critical our services are to our customers, their
applications and end users, and their businesses. We know this event impacted
many customers in significant ways. We will do everything we can to learn
from this event and use it to improve our availability even further," Amazon
said in a statement.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-
tech/amazon-says-automation-bug-caused-massive-aws-outage-
133028856.html?src=rss

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