Airlines Experience Website Outages Due to Global Amazon Cloud Issues

Major airlines in the United States have experienced disruptions to their websites and various digital services due to a global outage related to Amazon’s cloud computing platform.

The incident started on October 20, 2025, and has broadly impacted numerous websites and applications worldwide, particularly those reliant on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure.

According to Downdetector, well-known platforms like Snapchat, Spotify, Reddit, Facebook, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom have also been affected.

Airline websites such as Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, and Southwest Airlines were notably impacted, with Delta and United experiencing intermittent issues for several hours.

Travelers took to social media to express their frustrations about difficulties in accessing reservations and checking in for flights. Some also reported challenges with luggage drop-off via these platforms.

Amazon Web Services issued a statement on its website, identifying an “operational issue” as the cause of the outage. The company reported that customers in the US-EAST-1 region were facing “increased error rates and latencies across multiple AWS services.”

In a subsequent update, AWS noted, “We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding, and we are actively addressing a backlog of queued requests.” The company confirmed that while the primary issue has been resolved, there are still some lingering delay challenges.

Reflecting on prior incidents, a single update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike on July 19, 2024, triggered substantial outages, affecting over 8.5 million systems and causing disruptions for days across thousands of organizations globally.

This recent outage has indeed affected air travel operations significantly, with Delta notably delaying 46,013 flights and canceling 5,171 flights in a single day.

What are your thoughts on the impact of cloud service outages on critical industries like air travel?