If you’re reading this, then congratulations on being one of the lucky ones. This morning, billions of people woke up to discover that a huge part of the internet is down. Hundreds of key services, platforms, and apps are currently defunct.
This list includes *deep breath* Snapchat, Ring doorbells, Prime Video, My Fitness Pal, Amazon, Duolingo, Canva, Wordle, Coinbase, Reddit, Vodafone, PlayStation, the British tax authority, Fortnite, Roblox, Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Goodreads, Crunchyroll, Clash Royale, Venmo, The New York Times, and the Epic Games Store (and likely many more).
As you might imagine, people are losing their minds as they log in to app after app to discover that almost nothing is working. Is the internet under one of the biggest cyberattacks of all time, possibly including the destruction of infrastructure like undersea cables?
The whole internet down. That cyber attack coming pic.twitter.com/4FsolpCWUL
— Freddy Tiffany (@HiimDuncan) October 20, 2025
Massive US cyberattack going on currently. Hearing Coinbase, Robinhood , Venmo, gaming servers , Amazon servers down.
— David Bousquet (@Djbousquet) October 20, 2025
This is crazy. #cyberattack #cyberattacks #coinbase #robinhood #amazon #venmo #gaming #amazon pic.twitter.com/6emOeaL6aA
The root of the problem seems to be Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides the backbone for a huge part of the internet. In an operation update (via The Guardian), AWS reports that: “the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1” and reassures us that “We are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.”
If you don’t speak tech, this means AWS’s computers in their main US East data center can’t “find” their own database service. It’s like trying to call a friend’s phone number but getting “number not found” every time. The key database service is DynamoDB, which multiple apps and services rely on.
A tech oopsie or an attack?
Or, to put even more simply, this is a critical networking issue in Amazon’s most important data center that’s causing a chain reaction: when an important database can’t be found, the dominoes begin falling as apps break.
A bumbling technician might be to blame, or it could actually be a cyberattack from a state or hacking group who’s identified a vulnerability in AWS and brought it down. Either way, with this many apps and services down, tech companies are having a horrible day.
If this isn’t resolved soon, Oct. 20, 2025, may go down in history as the worst day in the internet’s history. Thankfully, you don’t have anything to worry about from We Got This Covered. We’ll never let a thing like a pesky internet outage stop us, and no hacker could ever discon… *bzzt*
Published: Oct 20, 2025 04:44 am