Slack is down. Zoom is down. Even Wordle is down, so don’t think about killing time with word games while your remote team figures out why their platforms are down. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the server platform behind hundreds of the Internet’s most popular apps, services, and games, and reports on the AWS Service health page confirm “increased error rates” as a chunk of the web goes down.
More user-friendly dashboards like Downdetector show the same news, though early signs show that recoveries are beginning to happen as the pings are dropping. Still, the apps listed at the top of their pages with the most reports expose how fragile some of the world’s favorites are, since they rely on Amazon’s web servers, as even fun apps like Snapchat and renowned video games like Fortnite bit the dust when AWS was suffering.
Somewhat comically, even the gigantic social media platform Reddit uses AWS, so common web searches for “why is [service] down reddit” can pull up errors and dead pages — suffering the exact same fate. Nevertheless, Amazon’s engineers “were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause”, so these downtimes will predicatably be over within a few hours.
⚠️ An outage affecting several services on the internet is also impacting Fortnite log-ins. We’re investigating this now, and will update you when we have more details.October 20, 2025
How long will AWS be down?
Per Amazon, service updates will continue until they have “more information to share, or by 2:00 AM. That’s the “US-East-1 region”, so times are based on US ET.
Thankfully, the majority of Windows Central’s operations are unaffected by any AWS downtime, except for a handful of conveniences that sometimes speed up our work. For now, you’ll perhaps find that only your workplace is affected if you’re a night owl in the United States, or if you’re closer to Europe and rely on servers hosted in the US.
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