Server outages were reported across the country on Monday impacting websites of online games.
The outages were all connected to Amazon Web Services and were first reported on the East coast as “increased error rates and latencies” connected to its operating facilities in Northern Virginia.
The outage impacted the Coinbase, Robinhood, and Venmo financial services companies, websites belonging to the companies United Airlines and Canva, as well as the games service operated by the New York Times.
Throughout the day Amazon Web Services, which hosts and powers any number of websites and apps through its vast cloud network, announced it was working on the problem.
In a public release, Amazon said it could confirm “increased error rates and latencies,” noting: “We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand the root cause.”
The site CNN Business has noted that past similar outages were caused by a “wide variety of errors, including faulty updates, the accidental injection of bad code, or a change to third-party software that doesn’t play nicely with a service.”
By early evening, the publication Business Insider reported that the problem almost certainly originated from a “domain name system error” at Amazon Web Services’ northern Virginia data center.
That news was soon followed by an announcement that the outage had been resolved, with all the 142 services that had been impacted by the outage back up and running. The company also reported that it had “reduced throttling of operations and worked in parallel to resolve network connectivity issues until the services fully recovered.”
Amazon is far and away the world’s cloud leader, reporting around $65 billion in revenue last year, compared to Microsoft’s just over $40 billion, and Google, at some $15 billion.
October 21, 2025
By Garry Boulard
Photo courtesy of Unsplash
