By: Lauryn Jelsema, Aquinas Reporter
On Oct. 20, a massive outage at Amazon Web Services disrupted major websites and apps. According to Downdetector, a website that offers real-time outage monitoring, approximately 2,000 companies were affected.
Services were restored within hours, but the disruption had an immediate and widespread effect: it delayed flights, prevented app purchases, blocked financial access, and created work issues. More than 8.1 million users reported internet problems. At 6:01 p.m. ET on Oct. 21, Amazon confirmed all AWS services had returned to normal.
Amazon first began experiencing significant connectivity problems in 2025 on Jan. 4. An outage led to increased error rates for AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) API requests. The most recent outage was mainly due to a bug in automation software. A DNS (domain name system) malfunction in the US-EAST-1 region was a key cause. DNS is what translates human-friendly searches into IP addresses to connect internet users to the right websites.
DynamoDB, Amazon’s database, maintains hundreds of thousands of DNS records. It uses automation to monitor the system, update records frequently, add capacity when needed, handle hardware failures, and distribute internet traffic efficiently.
A glitch in Amazon’s system accidentally deleted important internet address records from its database. Because of this, many services could not find the right connections online, causing widespread outages.
Platforms that experienced difficulties included Snapchat, Netflix, Delta Airlines, Roblox, Duolingo, multiple online banking services, and Amazon’s own retail website. The Ellucian Company has also experienced issues due to the AWS disruption. Ellucian is a major tech company that owns many college platforms, such as MyAQ and Self-Service.
For the past few weeks, MyAQ and Self-Service have been routinely shutting down and experiencing issues, affecting both students and staff. As of Oct. 31, Ellucian is still experiencing delays, and issues are still possible on Self-Service.
Self-Service error message – Photo by Lauryn Jelsema
Miranda Keifer, the Associate Registrar for Curriculum at Aquinas, said that the MyAQ and Self-Service outages significantly affected her and other staff members’ work in the registrar’s office.
“We use Self-Service a lot, especially during the advising season,” Keifer said. The registrar’s office was able to work around the problem effectively by using back-end software. According to Keifer, the outages only lasted 15 minutes at a time, so they were still able to accomplish some work. She also mentioned that staff in the office worked closely with ITS to resolve the issues.
“We are so grateful for their team,” said Keifer, talking about Information Technology Services.
Although some sites are still experiencing the aftereffects of the outage, AWS has reassured consumers and businesses. “We continue to observe recovery across all AWS services,” Amazon said.
Registrar and Financial Aid office – Photo by Aquinas College
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