How the AWS outage exposed the Internet’s fragile core

On 20 October 2025, when half of the world was engrossed in Diwali celebrations, the digital sphere experienced a major mishap. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing platform, had suffered a technical issue, and in the minutes following, it took down a host of websites dependent on its hosting service. While cloud computing outage is a common phenomenon, this one was big – it took down prominent services like Snapchat, Perplexity, Amazon’s e-commerce website, Prime Video, Signal, Atlassian, Apple’s digital services, and more.