INCIDENT REPORT · CP-2025-021
AWS us-east-1 outage
L3 · ELEVATEDCONFIRMEDNOT AN ATTACK
A latent race condition in DynamoDB's automated DNS management left the regional DynamoDB endpoint with an empty DNS record, triggering cascading failures in AWS's Northern Virginia region.
- Incident ID
- CP-2025-021
- Incident date
- 20 OCT 2025
- Detection date
- 20 OCT 2025
- Affected countries
- United States
- Plotted location
- Ashburn, Virginia, United States (Affected infrastructure (AWS US-EAST-1, Northern Virginia))
- Threat classification
- Level 3 — ELEVATED
- Classification rationale
- Widespread multi-sector service disruption from a single cloud region failure; not malicious.
- Attack type
- Non-Malicious IT Failure
- Nature
- Non-malicious failure — not a cyberattack
- Attack vector
- Not publicly documented
- Sectors
- Technology, Finance, Media, Retail
- Critical infrastructure
- Yes
- Organizations affected
- Amazon Web Services, Many AWS-dependent services worldwide
- Operational consequences
- DynamoDB, EC2 instance launches, Network Load Balancer and global features relying on us-east-1 were impaired for roughly 14 hours (11:48 PM PDT 19 Oct to 2:20 PM PDT 20 Oct per AWS), disrupting many consumer and business applications.
- Estimated financial impact
- No reliably documented figure
- Attribution (as stated)
- No official attribution recorded
SOURCE REFERENCES
- [1] Summary of the Amazon DynamoDB Service Disruption in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) RegionAmazon Web Services · aws.amazon.com
- [2] AWS outage analysis: October 20, 2025ThousandEyes · thousandeyes.com
RECORD CREATED 14 NOV 2026 · LAST UPDATED 14 NOV 2026 · Threat levels are editorial assessments, not official government ratings.