Aspen Policy Academy

Outage at Amazon Web Services Disrupts Websites Across the Internet

  • Article Published October 20, 2025

This segment originally aired on NPR’s All Things Considered on October 20, 2025.

By Jaclyn Diaz

A massive outage at Amazon Web Services disrupted major websites and apps on Monday, in a show of how one company’s online infrastructure has become essential for many modern businesses to function.

Amazon said it was fixing the problem, but some disruptions were still ongoing as of Monday evening.

Tech experts tell NPR the incident highlights just how vulnerable companies are to these kinds of outages.

Here’s what to know about what happened and why a single outage could be so damaging.

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