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Amazon's 15-hour cloud outage on 21 October 2025 will cost businesses billions in lost revenue. Companies will likely pass increased redundancy costs to consumers.
AWS's US-EAST-1 data centre in Northern Virginia suffered a Domain Name System malfunction starting at 3:00 AM ET on Monday, disrupting Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox, Fortnite, Venmo, Robinhood, Amtrak reservations, Coinbase, and Perplexity until 6:00 PM ET when services returned to normal.
AWS commands 30-37% of global cloud infrastructure. When one data centre fails, 1,000+ companies lose revenue simultaneously.
They then rebuild redundancy systems and charge customers for additional resilience.
Watch for Q4 earnings calls from affected companies quantifying losses, enterprise contract renewals with penalty clauses, and regulatory scrutiny of concentrated infrastructure from the Federal Trade Commission's Big Tech investigation.
[Analysis] Al Jazeera explains the technical failure, market concentration risk, and cascading impact. Published 21 Oct 2025
AWS's US-EAST-1 data centre in Northern Virginia suffered a Domain Name System malfunction starting at 3:00 AM ET on Monday. The DNS acts as the internet's address book—when it failed, applications couldn't find DynamoDB even though the database itself kept running. This marks the third major outage in five years from the same Virginia facility. AWS commands 30-37% of global cloud infrastructure according to Gartner, so one broken data centre disrupted Snapchat, Reddit, Venmo, Robinhood, Amtrak, Coinbase, and Perplexity simultaneously until 6:00 PM ET.
Amazon charged companies for 15 hours of services they couldn't use. Then those companies will charge you for the backup systems they're now scrambling to build.
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