Major airlines in the United States have reported that their websites and some digital services were not fully operational amid a global outage linked to Amazon’s cloud services.
The outage, which started on October 20, 2025, has already affected numerous websites and applications globally, disrupting various services that depend on Amazon Web Services infrastructure.
According to Downdetector, the outage affected popular sites such as Snapchat, Spotify, Reddit, Facebook, Microsoft Teams and Zoom, among others.
Airline websites, such as Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, and Southwest Airlines, were among the victims of the outage. Reportedly, both Delta and United’s websites experienced intermittent disruptions for several hours.
Some travelers took to social media to complain that they were experiencing issues accessing reservations and checking in for flights, while others said they had encountered problems with luggage drop-off through these platforms.
In a statement on its website, Amazon Web Services, the cloud provider responsible for the outage, cited an “operational issue” as the cause for the outage, stating that customers were experiencing “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region”.
“We are seeing significant signs of recovery,” the company said in the latest update. “Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests. We will continue to provide additional information.”
The company said that currently the main problem causing the outage has been resolved, and most services are functioning normally now. However, the system is still processing a backlog of delayed requests.
On July 19, 2024, a single content update from CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity software company, led to over 8.5 million systems crashing, causing disruptions for days across thousands of organizations globally.
The outage affected air travel operations, impacting both airlines and airports worldwide. Delta was especially affected by the chaos, having to delay 46,013 flights and cancel 5,171 in a single day.
