A claim is circulating online that Russia and China were behind the recent AWS outage on 20 October 2025, which disrupted major applications and websites worldwide. The outage was real, but our investigation found the claim is false.
Social Media Posts
Multiple users posted the claim linking that the AWS outage with geopolitically-charged actors (Russia, China) and propose that the root cause is a cyber-offensive rather than technical failure.
Fact Check
Root cause of the AWS outage
AWS published an update confirming that between 11:49 PM PDT on 19 October and 2:24 AM PDT on 20 October, services in the US-EAST-1 region experienced problems. AWS identified the cause as DNS resolution issues, essentially, a problem with the system that translates service names into network addresses. The outage originated in the US-EAST-1 region (Northern Virginia), one of AWS’s largest data centers.
AWS’s status updates pointed to issues within their EC2 internal network and a subsystem that monitors network load-balancers. Importantly, these were internal problems, not caused by external traffic overload or DDoS attacks. AWS stated: “the issue originated from within the EC2 internal network … the underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated.”
Independent analysis confirmed this assessment. ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring firm, found “no coinciding network events,” which strongly suggested the problem was within AWS’s own service architecture rather than from outside attacks.
Major news outlets consistently reported the cause as a technical fault, not a cyber-attack. The Associated Press described it as “a problem at Amazon’s cloud computing service … not indications of a security event.”
(Source: About Amazon, The Guardian, AP News)
Impact & Scope of Disruption
The outage impacted numerous major applications and websites, including Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo, Reddit, Canva, Robinhood, and Amazon’s retail services. Millions of user-incident reports were logged globally, with media outlets describing it as one of the largest internet disruptions in recent memory.
However, services began recovering by early morning (U.S. time) on 20 October, and full restoration occurred within hours.
While many services experienced issues, the claim that “Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Snapchat, Coinbase and Oracle all facing huge error rates” requires clarification. Services like Snapchat did report problems. However, many of these companies experienced disruptions not because they were directly attacked, but because their services rely on AWS infrastructure. When AWS experienced its outage, dependent services were consequently affected. (Source)
Evidence of a DDoS attack by Russia/China
There is no public attribution from AWS, government cybersecurity agencies (such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the U.S.), or major cybersecurity firms that identify a DDoS campaign or link Russian or Chinese state actors to this specific outage.
The technical indicators, internal DNS resolution errors and internal monitoring subsystem faults, are inconsistent with a large-scale external volumetric DDoS attack, which typically shows external traffic floods, mitigation traces, and attribution efforts. Instead, the tracing leads to internal AWS subsystems. Expert commentary confirms this assessment: Patrick Burgess, a UK cybersecurity expert, explained to AP, “There’s no indication that it was caused by a cyber-attack … This looks like a good old-fashioned technology issue.”
Conclusion
The claim that Russia and China were behind the AWS outage on October 20, 2025, is false. AWS confirmed the disruption was caused by internal DNS resolution issues within their US-EAST-1 region, not by external cyberattacks. There is no credible evidence linking foreign state actors to this incident, and cybersecurity experts have characterized it as a technical failure rather than a security breach.
Title:Russia and China Did Not Cause the October 2025 AWS Outage
Fact Check By: Pranpreeya PResult: False
