- Date
- 2025-10-20
- Duration
- ~3 hours of core failure, up to ~15 hours of cascading disruption
- Root cause
- A DNS resolution failure tied to a latent race condition in DynamoDB's automated DNS management in Amazon's us-east-1 (N. Virginia) region. DynamoDB endpoint lookups failed, then the problem cascaded into EC2 and dozens of other AWS services as customers tried to recover, breaking apps that depend on the region.
- Services affected
- reddit.com web and mobile, alongside many AWS-dependent platforms (Snapchat, Roblox, Venmo, Coinbase and others)
Impact
On October 20, 2025, the us-east-1 outage took Reddit offline along with a large swath of the internet, contributing to over 17 million outage reports across affected services. The initial DynamoDB DNS fault lasted roughly three hours and was followed by extended EC2 instability, leaving Reddit and other sites busted or half-working for much of the day before AWS restored normal operations.