Late last month, Amazon Web Services – the world’s largest cloud provider – experienced a catastrophic outage that many dubbed an “internet blackout.” The trouble began on October 19, 2025, inside AWS’s busiest data center hub in Northern Virginia. According to Amazon, a “DNS resolution issue” in that region set off a chain reaction of failurestechcrunch.com. In simpler terms, part of the internet’s “phone book” stopped working properly. Specifically, AWS’s internal Domain Name System – which translates service names to network locations – suddenly couldn’t find the address for Amazon’s DynamoDB database servicetomsguide.comtomsguide.com. DynamoDB is a core component used by countless applications, so this was like the phone book losing the number to a major switchboard.
