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Reddit went down on Monday, October 20, 2025, as part of a massive global internet outage that crippled dozens of major websites and applications. The disruption, which began around 23:40 PM PT, was caused by a critical failure in Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud infrastructure provider that powers a significant portion of the internet.
According to outage tracking website Downdetector, Reddit experienced a sharp spike in user complaints, with reports climbing from a baseline of just 4 to over 12,000 at the peak of the disruption at approximately 3:40 AM PT. The majority of issues affected Reddit’s mobile app (56% of complaints), followed by website access problems (33%), and server connection errors (11%). Users reported that pages failed to load, new posts wouldn’t publish, and feeds became inaccessible.
Unlike many previous outages where Reddit remained silent, the company quickly acknowledged the problem through its official @redditstatus Twitter/X account. The brief statement confirmed that Reddit was actively investigating the elevated error rates affecting the platform. The official Reddit Status page also reflected infrastructure issues, though it reported 100% uptime, indicating the servers were operational but not functioning properly.
The outage stemmed from a major operational issue in Amazon Web Services’ US-EAST-1 region, located in northern Virginia. AWS confirmed on its health dashboard that it was experiencing “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services”. The company later identified the specific problem as “significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region”.
The technical issue appears to have been DNS-related. Users on Reddit’s r/aws subreddit noted before the outage that the DynamoDB API endpoint couldn’t be resolved, which cascaded to affect IAM (Identity and Access Management) and subsequently disrupted numerous other services.
Reddit was far from alone in experiencing disruptions. The AWS outage affected a staggering array of popular services, creating what some are calling the biggest internet disruption since the CrowdStrike incident in July 2024. Over 100 major platforms experienced issues, including:
- Fortnite, Roblox, Clash Royale, Clash of Clans, Pokémon GO, and Dead by Daylight
The outage represents the most substantial internet disruption since the CrowdStrike failure in July 2024, which affected hospitals, banks, and airports worldwide. These recurring incidents underscore the vulnerability of centralized cloud infrastructure and the cascading effects when major providers like AWS experience technical failures.
The incident serves as a stark reminder of how dependent modern internet services have become on a handful of cloud infrastructure providers, and how a single point of failure can bring down vast swaths of the digital ecosystem.
