Deep Dive

AWS outage causes widespread disruption

Service

ORX News

Community

ORX News Community

Content

Deep Dive - July 2026

Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage causes widespread disruption to financial and consumer websites and apps.

On 20 October 2025, AWS experienced a technical issue that caused a global outage lasting more than 15 hours. The disruption affected more than 3,500 organisations worldwide, impacting financial institutions, payment providers, retailers and other critical services.

Find out more about this major operational risk loss event by downloading the free Deep Dive from ORX News.

Originally published for ORX News subscribers in December 2025, this Deep Dive has now been made available to everyone. It provides an in-depth analysis of the event, including:

A detailed explanation of how the outage unfolded, from the initial technical fault to the global service disruption
The operational resilience lessons, including cloud concentration risk, third-party dependencies and single-provider reliance
The remedial measures taken by AWS and affected organisations to strengthen resilience and reduce future disruption
The financial, operational and regulatory impact on financial institutions and other organisations worldwide

Download the Deep Dive for the full analysis. Don't forget – if your firm subscribes to ORX News, you can access a wide range of expert analysis and major operational risk loss events like this on the ORX News platform.

At 00:11 PDT on 20 October 2025, AWS announced that it had experienced a technical issue leading to a global outage of its services. AWS identified the root cause as a Domain Name System (DNS) resolution issue that prevented customers accessing its cloud database system, DynamoDB.

The event began at 23:48 PDT on 19 October 2025, and AWS’ services were impacted for around 15 hours. According to Downdetector, there were over 17 million outage reports in over 60 countries, with over 6.3 million reports in the US and 1.5 million in the UK. Over 3,500 businesses were reportedly affected. By 21 October 2025, most businesses had resumed normal operations.

ORX News is the industry’s leading source of operational risk loss events. Firms can subscribe for exclusive data and analysis tailored to the banking, insurance, and asset management sectors.

How does it work?

Our team of dedicated researchers can collectively speak over seven major languages. Accessing recent operational and non-financial risk (ONFR) loss events is made effortless through the ORX News website, where they are summarised in English, categorised, searchable, and exportable. ORX News keeps you informed and connected with the latest ONFR developments and you can use the data for modelling, benchmarking and scenarios.

Disclaimer: ORX has prepared this resource with care and attention. ORX does not accept responsibility for any errors or omissions. ORX does not warrant the accuracy of the advice, statement or recommendations in this resource. ORX shall not be liable for any loss, expense, damage or claim arising from this resource. The content of this resource does not itself constitute a contractual agreement, and ORX accepts no obligation associated with this resource except as expressly agreed in writing. ©ORX 2026