A prolonged outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on October 20 caused disruptions across various industries, including logistics and supply chain operations. The incident, which lasted approximately 15 hours, originated in AWS’s US-East-1 region in Northern Virginia and affected several core cloud services.
The outage was linked to DNS resolution issues affecting Amazon DynamoDB. These issues caused service degradation in EC2, Lambda, CloudWatch, and SQS. According to AWS Health Dashboard updates, organizations experienced increased error rates, delayed EC2 instance launches, and throttled functions such as message processing and Lambda event handling. These technical problems affected logistics workflows.
Amazon customers received notices of delayed deliveries, and some were unable to access tracking information. Systems used in Amazon fulfillment centers, which rely on AWS services, also experienced slower response times. These disruptions impacted the efficiency of pick, pack, and ship operations. Organizations that rely on Amazon’s Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) services experienced related delays, particularly where operations depend on real-time cloud-based coordination.
Warehouses and third-party logistics providers (3PLs) that use AWS-based platforms also reported operational issues. These included delayed inventory updates, slower API responses in freight management systems, and intermittent failures in order routing and tracking dashboards. These effects extended to tools supporting forecasting, shipment scheduling, and delivery tracking. In some cases, fallback systems or manual intervention were used to maintain operations.
According to AWS, the issue began with DNS failures affecting DynamoDB endpoints in the US-East-1 region. This led to internal errors in EC2 and load balancer health checks. As a result, services such as Lambda and SQS were impacted. Engineers applied mitigation measures throughout the day, including throttling specific services to reduce load and stabilize systems. AWS reported full recovery of core services by late afternoon on October 20. Some services continued to process backlogs after restoration.
The outage brought attention to the role of cloud infrastructure in logistics and supply chain operations. It highlighted the operational impact of service degradation and the importance of contingency planning for cloud service interruptions.
Organizations are reviewing architecture and risk management approaches to ensure business continuity in the event of future outages. This includes evaluating the criticality of cloud-reliant systems, identifying areas where redundancies may be needed, and assessing internal processes for responding to similar events.
The AWS outage on October 20 demonstrated the potential operational consequences of cloud service disruptions. For organizations that depend on cloud infrastructure for logistics and fulfillment, continuity planning and system resilience remain important priorities.