Reddit Knocked Offline for Hours by AWS and Cloudflare Outages

On October 20, 2025, Reddit was among more than 1,000 major services taken offline by a failure in Amazon Web Services' US-East-1 region in Northern Virginia. The incident, rooted in a DNS resolution failure affecting the DynamoDB endpoint, cascaded across tens of thousands of services including Snapchat, Fortnite, Coinbase, and Ring doorbells. Reddit was reported to be unavailable for roughly 15 hours.

Less than a month later, on November 18, 2025, a major Cloudflare outage again disrupted large portions of the internet. Cloudflare's network began experiencing significant failures at around 11:20 UTC, producing widespread 500 errors. Cloudflare said the issue was triggered by a change to one of its database systems' permissions, which caused a configuration file used by its Bot Management system to balloon in size and propagate across its network. The outage was not caused by a cyberattack.

Both incidents underscored Reddit's reliance on a small number of foundational internet-infrastructure providers, where a single upstream failure can render the platform inaccessible regardless of Reddit's own engineering. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince publicly apologized, saying any outage of Cloudflare's systems was unacceptable.

The back-to-back events in late 2025 intensified broader public discussion about the fragility of internet infrastructure and the systemic risk posed by dependence on AWS and Cloudflare.