On Monday, October 20, 2025, starting at around 3 a.m., ET Amazon Warehouse Services went down around the world. You may think that this is a rather small problem, but there’s far more that meets the eye when it comes to the importance of AWS.
AWS is integral in running many online sites and tech functions worldwide. Students here at Bel Air High and all over the country failed to access sites such as Canvas, Turnitin, and more, and teachers failed to access their lesson plans. Major online games shut down. Communication tools in places such as hospitals went down– Ring cameras, credit card readers, and many other techs of the same sort were disabled. Banking services such as Chime were down too, leaving people unable to access their money.
The problem derives from the fact that AWS is not just a warehouse for Amazon, but is a member of a small group of cloud computing juggernauts in which form the backbone of the internet, and that backbone snapped. Without AWS support, many of these companies lost their storage, control of their servers, and more due to this crash. Of all the Computing powers, AWS is the largest one, with 37% of the market employing its services.
Because of this shutdown, an estimated range of multiple billion dollars is expected to be lost across its customer base of about 4 million, despite only being down for about 15 hours.