✅ AWS Confirms Full Mitigation of DNS Issue in US-EAST-1 Region — Most Services Fully Recovered
Date: October 20, 2025
Region Affected: N. Virginia (US-EAST-1)
Current Status: 🟢 Operational (Recovery in Progress)
After several hours of degraded performance and intermittent API failures, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that the underlying DNS issue causing widespread outages in the US-EAST-1 region has been fully mitigated.
According to the latest AWS Health Dashboard update at 3:35 AM PDT, most AWS services are now operating normally.
Some users, however, may still encounter minor throttling or delayed responses as AWS works through a backlog of queued events affecting services like CloudTrail and Lambda.
🧩 Official AWS Statement – Oct 20, 3:35 AM PDT
“The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS service operations are succeeding normally now. Some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution. Additionally, some services are continuing to work through a backlog of events such as CloudTrail and Lambda.
While most operations are recovered, requests to launch new EC2 instances (or services that launch EC2 instances such as ECS) in the US-EAST-1 Region are still experiencing increased error rates. We continue to work toward full resolution.
If you are still experiencing an issue resolving the DynamoDB service endpoints in US-EAST-1, we recommend flushing your DNS caches. We will provide an update by 4:15 AM, or sooner if we have additional information to share.”
⚙️ Current Status Summary
| Category | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| DynamoDB | 🟢 Recovered | DNS issue resolved, normalizing |
| EC2 / ECS Launch Requests | 🟡 Partially Impacted | Some launch errors still observed |
| CloudWatch / CloudTrail / Lambda | 🟡 Recovering | Working through event backlog |
| IAM / STS / Global Services | 🟢 Fully Operational | Confirmed recovery across all regions |
| Support Center / APIs | 🟢 Operational | All request flows restored |
🧠 What This Means for AWS Users
- ✅ You can resume normal operations — most services are restored.
- ⚠️ If EC2 instance creation still fails, retry or wait several minutes.
- 🔄 Flush local DNS cache if you’re still unable to resolve
dynamodb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com. - 🧰 Monitor CloudWatch metrics — delayed logs and alarms may still propagate.
- 🕐 Backlogged events (like CloudTrail logs and Lambda triggers) may take time to catch up.
AWS engineers continue to monitor system health globally and will post a final confirmation once all services are fully normalized.
🌍 Recap of the Incident
- Root Cause: DNS resolution issue affecting DynamoDB API endpoints.
- Duration: ~3 hours (from 12:11 AM PDT to 3:35 AM PDT).
- Services Impacted: Up to 58 AWS services including EC2, Lambda, CloudWatch, and IAM.
- Mitigation: Parallel recovery paths + DNS rerouting within the US-EAST-1 control plane.
- Resolution: Full mitigation achieved; gradual recovery verified.
💡 Lessons Learned
This outage highlights how deeply DNS dependencies can impact distributed cloud systems. Even though AWS maintains global redundancy, internal DNS failures can cascade across multiple services.
Best practices moving forward:
- Use multi-region architecture for critical workloads.
- Implement DNS failover and caching strategies.
- Regularly test service failover and resilience under outage scenarios.
📘 Official Sources
If you want to learn more about cloud reliability, AWS infrastructure, and DevOps best practices,
visit 👉 dargslan.com — your hub for professional cloud education, IT books, and infrastructure learning.