Reddit Knocked Offline for Hours by AWS and Cloudflare Outages

On October 20, 2025, Reddit was knocked offline by a failure in Amazon Web Services' US-East-1 region in Northern Virginia that ultimately affected more than 2,000 companies and services, including Ring, Snapchat, Fortnite, Roblox, the PlayStation Network, Venmo and online banking. Outage tracker Downdetector logged more than 9.8 million reports worldwide, including 2.7 million from the United States and over 1.1 million from the UK. AWS first flagged increased error rates and latencies just after midnight Pacific time; Reddit's status page showed the site coming back online around 4:30 a.m. PT, error reports spiked again when the West Coast workday began, and Amazon did not declare the problems resolved until 3:53 p.m. PT.

AWS's post-incident report said the outage 'was triggered by a latent defect within the service's automated DNS management system that caused endpoint resolution failures for DynamoDB,' compounded by a 'race condition' in which overlapping automated repair processes undid each other's work. AWS apologized, disabled some of the automation involved, and pledged to fix the race condition and add protections against applying incorrect DNS plans.

Less than a month later, on November 18, 2025, a major Cloudflare outage again disrupted large portions of the internet, taking down sites including X, OpenAI, Spotify and, ironically, the outage tracker Downdetector itself. Cloudflare's network began failing at 11:20 UTC, producing widespread 500 errors. The company said the issue was not caused by a cyberattack: a database permissions change caused a configuration 'feature file' used by its Bot Management system to double in size, and when the oversized file propagated across the network it exceeded a size limit in the traffic-routing software, causing it to fail. Engineers initially suspected a hyper-scale DDoS attack before identifying the real cause; core traffic was largely flowing by 14:30 UTC and all systems were normal by 17:06.

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. Downdetector's product director noted that outages in which 'a foundational internet service brings down a large swath of online services' happen only a handful of times a year but are probably becoming more frequent as companies rely completely on cloud services, and Ookla analyst Luke Kehoe drew the lesson that distributing critical workloads across multiple regions 'can materially reduce the blast radius of future incidents.' The back-to-back failures in late 2025 intensified broader public discussion about the fragility of internet infrastructure and the systemic risk posed by dependence on AWS and Cloudflare.