AWS Outage Disrupts Global Apps

If you tried to use your favourite app today and it just wouldn’t load, you weren’t alone. One of the biggest reasons behind today’s digital chaos was a major downtime at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the backbone that powers much of the modern internet. From social media platforms to online games and even government systems, AWS keeps a massive portion of the web running.

The outage began early Monday morning, October 20 2025, when AWS’s US-East-1 region in Virginia experienced widespread failures. The problem started with issues in Amazon’s DNS and DynamoDB database systems, two critical services that connect apps to their data and users. Because so many platforms rely on AWS for servers and storage, the disruption quickly spread around the world.

Big-name apps like Snapchat, Fortnite, Signal, and Duolingo were among the first to go down. Some users couldn’t log in at all, while others faced slow or broken features. Amazon has since announced that the main issue has been resolved, but warned that not all services are fully back to normal. Engineers are still working to clear backlogs and restore full stability across affected platforms.

For Zimbabwean developers, businesses, and users, this is another reminder that even the world’s biggest tech companies aren’t immune to downtime. It’s also a lesson in cloud diversity, relying on more than one provider can be the difference between staying online and losing business.