Cloud service failure highlights the travel industry’s growing dependence on Amazon Web Services
Oct 21, 2025
A widespread outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) brought major parts of the internet to a halt, disrupting airlines, hotel groups, OTAs, and travel platforms that rely on AWS infrastructure. The incident, traced to a DNS issue in AWS’s Virginia region, underscored the travel sector’s vulnerability to cloud service disruptions.
Key takeaways
- Massive global impact: More than 6.5 million outage reports were filed as platforms including Canva, Roblox, Snapchat, and Amazon itself went offline.
- Travel industry exposure: AWS powers critical systems for airlines like Delta, United, Southwest, Air Canada, and Ryanair, as well as hotels including Hilton, Hyatt, and Best Western.
- OTAs and car rentals hit: Expedia Group, Booking Holdings, Avis, Hertz, and Budget Rent a Car were among the AWS-dependent travel companies affected.
- Technical cause: AWS attributed the disruption to DNS resolution issues in its DynamoDB API endpoints within the US-East-1 region, later fully mitigated.
- Lesson for hoteliers and travel firms: The outage highlights the operational risk of over-reliance on a single cloud provider and the importance of building redundancy into mission-critical systems.
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