Amazon outage leads to widespread Internet blackout in South Africa
Internet users worldwide are reporting issues trying to access services hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS), with impacted platforms including Bash, Zoom, and SnapChat.
Other major impacted companies and services include Atlassian, Coinbase, Perplexity AI, the Epic Games Store, Amazon Prime Video, and Roblox.
AWS has acknowledged the issues on its Service Health page, saying the outage has disrupted its DynamoDB service, which had a knock-on affect on other AWS services.
“We can confirm significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-East-1 Region,” it said.
“This issue also affects other AWS Services in the US-East-1 Region. During this time, customers may be unable to create or update Support Cases.”
It added that engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on mitigating the issue, while determining and understanding the root cause.
Other impacted AWS services include AWS Config, Database Migration Service, Elemental, Lambda, CloudFront, Elastic Cloud Compute, Elastic Kubernetes Service, and Interactive Video Service.
However, it should be noted that the list of other impacted AWS services continues to get longer MyBroadband contacted Amazon for comment, and it directed us to its AWS Health Dashboard.
“We have identified a potential root cause for error rates for the DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region,” it stated.
“Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1. We are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.”
Amazon said the issue also affects other AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. Global services or features that rely on US-EAST-1 endpoints such as IAM updates and DynamoDB Global tables may also be experiencing issues.
“During this time, customers may be unable to create or update Support Cases. We recommend customers continue to retry any failed requests,” it said.
Reports of issues at AWS started emerging at around 08:45 on Monday, 20 October 2025, on outage reporting platform Downdetector.co.za. Many users have posted about the challenges on social media.
“A massive internet outage is affecting popular gaming apps like Dead By Daylight, Fortnite, and Roblox,” one user posted on X/Twitter.
“Major apps down. Many of the largest apps are reportedly experiencing major issues. Amazon, Snapchat, Roblox, and Fortnite are among some of the affected apps,” another user posted.
The chart below shows the spike in Downdetector.co.za reports regarding an outage at AWS that began at around 08:45 on Monday, 20 October 2025
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