Amazon Web Outage Knocks Out US Businesses

How critical are cloud computing giants to the U.S. business ecosystem?

AWS blamed an internal subsystem failure for the outage, which began around 3 a.m. Eastern time and took about 13 hours to fully resolve.

Ask any company that relies on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which sent firms as varied as Snap, McDonald’s, Coinbase, and the publisher of Barron’s scrambling Monday after a massive outage knocked out websites and apps, Mackenzie Tatananni, Callum Keown, and Janet H. Cho reported for Barron’s Daily on Oct. 21, 2025.

AWS blamed an internal subsystem failure for the outage, which began around 3 a.m. Eastern time and took about 13 hours to fully resolve.

Coinbase assured users their funds were safe, while Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal and MarketWatch, also reported disruptions.

Other affected firms included Fidelity, Robinhood Markets, Venmo, and United Airlines, whose passengers were unable to access flight information. Slack and Roblox were also hit.

The outage could cost businesses billions of dollars in lost sales and ripple through supply chains, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing delivery platform ParcelHero.

A CrowdStrike outage in 2024 caused an estimated $5.4 billion in losses for Fortune 500 companies, the report noted. A total of 113 AWS services were affected, with only a few dozen restored by late morning; most issues persisted throughout the day before stabilizing by evening.

Mike Chapple, an IT professor at the University of Notre Dame, said the event underscores the world’s dependence on major cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

“When a major cloud provider sneezes, the internet catches a cold,” he told the Journal.