In a reminder of how deeply the internet’s backbone influences daily life, a major disruption to Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday left South Africans unable to access essential sites and popular applications for several hours. The failure, traced to the United States East Coast, rippled across continents, interrupting banks, work platforms, and entertainment services alike.
Major Platforms Go Dark
Local technology outlet MyBroadband reported that the outage reached platforms as varied as Standard Bank, Snapchat, Roblox, and Fortnite. Users across the country experienced widespread errors as key connections to AWS infrastructure failed.
AWS said it saw significant error rates for requests to the DynamoDB API in its US-EAST-1 region and that DNS resolution of the DynamoDB endpoint appears to be a likely cause.
The company added that its engineers were deployed immediately and had begun multiple recovery paths while continuing to investigate the root cause.
“Engineers engaged immediately and are working on several parallel recovery paths while investigating the root cause,”
the AWS Health Dashboard stated.
Users Feel The Impact
Reports of service problems began escalating just before 9am on Monday, 20 October 2025. According to monitoring sites and MyBroadband, South African users began sharing screenshots and error messages as systems stalled. Downdetector, a website that tracks online disruptions, showed a steep surge in complaints during the early morning.
“A game session and a work meeting both failed to reconnect, leaving me unsure which services would recover first,”
one user posted on X, summing up the frustrations of many.
These individual stories reflect a broader dependency on a limited number of cloud providers. As The Verge noted,
“Those immediate experiences underline how much daily life now depends on a small number of cloud endpoints.”
Widespread Service Interruptions
The breakdown extended far beyond social media and gaming platforms. Business-critical tools like Canva, Xero, and Simple Pay were also affected, disrupting office productivity across South Africa. Some customers at major financial institutions, including Standard Bank, reported slow or unavailable digital banking functions.
AWS confirmed that the disruption stemmed from issues within its US-EAST-1 region, a primary hub for many global services. While the problem was not localised to South Africa, its effects demonstrated how interconnected the global internet infrastructure has become.
The Push For Resilience
For both companies and consumers, Monday’s outage was a stark reminder of the need for redundancy and resilience in digital systems. Many organisations are now revisiting their disaster recovery strategies, assessing whether their reliance on a single cloud region leaves them vulnerable.
AWS has since urged users to monitor its Health Dashboard for ongoing updates and system restoration information.
“Organisations and consumers are advised to follow the AWS Health Dashboard,”
the company reiterated, assuring users that services would stabilise as recovery paths progressed.
Despite gradual improvement throughout the day, the incident reinforced an uncomfortable truth — that the convenience of a connected world carries with it a shared point of failure.
