The Day the Internet Stood Still — Why Snapchat, Reddit, Slack, Venmo and More Went Dark This Morning
I woke up this morning, coffee in hand, ready to check my phone like always. But something felt off. My usual scroll through Snapchat didn’t load. Reddit wouldn’t refresh. Even Slack was stuck. I thought it was my Wi-Fi at first — until messages from friends started rolling in saying the same thing: nothing was working. It wasn’t just a glitch on my end; the internet had actually gone dark for millions.
Around 3 a.m. ET on Monday, October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began reporting issues with one of its main data hubs — the US-EAST-1 region based in Virginia. That single area handles a huge share of online infrastructure, powering everything from payment systems to chat apps. Within an hour, the slowdown turned into a full-scale outage. Sites like Snapchat, Reddit, Slack, Venmo, WhatsApp, and even gaming and security apps like Ring began crashing or refusing to load. By 4:30 a.m., what started as “increased error rates” had become a global internet disruption.
If you tried to pay someone on Venmo, send a file on Slack, or check messages on Reddit, chances are you got nowhere. Even some news outlets, streaming platforms, and retail services slowed down. It wasn’t your phone or your router — it was the cloud itself breaking for a few hours. AWS engineers quickly identified the problem as a DNS (Domain Name System) malfunction — basically, the online address book that tells your browser where to go stopped working properly. When that happens, apps that rely on Amazon’s servers can’t connect at all.
By 6:35 a.m. ET, AWS announced it had “fully mitigated the issue,” and most services slowly began recovering. For many users, that meant getting notifications, payments, and old messages all at once — a reminder of how connected our digital lives really are. By mid-morning, most platforms were stable again, though a few users still reported slow performance or login problems.
The weirdest part of the whole experience wasn’t just the silence of apps — it was the silence of habit. So many of us instinctively open Snapchat or Reddit without thinking, and for a moment today, those tiny rituals disappeared. Offices relying on Slack had to delay morning check-ins. Friends couldn’t split bills. Social media felt frozen. It was like someone pressed “pause” on the online world, and we all got a rare look at how dependent we’ve become on invisible networks.
These kinds of outages aren’t new, but each one hits a little harder. The last major AWS issue in 2021 caused similar chaos across platforms, and every time, it reminds us that the internet isn’t this endless, flawless system we imagine. It’s a fragile mesh of servers and code that can fail like anything else. One hiccup in Virginia can ripple across continents.
By noon, things were mostly back to normal, but the event sparked a wave of reflection online. Users joked about being “forced to touch grass,” while others pointed out how dependent businesses, governments, and individuals have become on a handful of cloud providers. There’s comfort in how quickly engineers fixed it — and discomfort in how much power a single company holds over the digital heartbeat of the world.
Today’s outage may have lasted just a few hours, but it left a lasting impression. The next time you open an app and it loads perfectly, maybe take a second to appreciate the millions of silent connections behind that click. Because as we all learned this morning, the world can go dark with a single server error — and when it does, we realize how intertwined our lives truly are.
