It was a peek into what life could possibly look like in late 2025 without the internet, and it was … quite an adjustment. When Amazon Web Services went down for hours on Monday, Oct. 20, several restaurant brands — and restaurant adjacent companies — were impacted.
AWS, a major provider of the cloud computing market with about 30% share in the space, underpins apps from the likes of McDonald’s and Starbucks, both of which experienced outages Monday. According to the website DownDetector, more than 1,500 people reported issues with the Starbucks app during the morning daypart peak, with even more taking to social media to express their displeasure about not being able to pre-order drinks, access rewards, or use the mobile pay feature.
McDonald’s app outage affected nearly 7,000 users who reported issues on DownDetector, also during the morning peak. Nation’s Restaurant News reached out to both Starbucks and McDonald’s for comment.
Notably, plenty of restaurant partners were also impacted because their services, such as DoorDash and Toast, were impacted. DoorDash customers were unable to place orders, for instance, while drivers experienced a halt in delivery opportunities, and restaurants were unable to fulfill delivery orders. Grubhub also reported an outage.
Meanwhile, many restaurants on the Toast point-of-sale system experienced complete system failures, disrupted scheduling systems, problems with waitlist management, and other issues. JD’s Hamburgers in Fort Worth, Texas, manually added its transactions after its Toast system went down. The Toast New American Gastro Pub in Richmond, Va., estimated that the outage caused “a lot of business lost.”
A manager at Cattleman’s Roadhouse in New Albany, Ind., offered to pay for meals because the restaurant was unable to process credit cards. General manager Cameron Sharp told CNN that he was grateful the outage happened on a Monday and not a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, when business picks up.
AWS reported services returning to normal by Monday afternoon. All told, more than 1,000 companies experienced some downtime during the AWS outage Monday, costing an estimated billions of dollars globally and demonstrating the increasing dependence on cloud infrastructure services.
Contact Alicia Kelso at [email protected]
Follow her on TikTok: @aliciakelso
