October 21, 2025 — Thousands of Venmo users across the United States were left unable to send or receive money on Monday after a major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage disrupted some of the internet’s biggest platforms.
AWS Outage Causes Domino Effect
The disruption began around 12:11 a.m. PDT in the AWS US-East-1 region, when engineers noticed increasing error rates in several internal systems.
According to Amazon’s official status page, a DNS-resolution error in its DynamoDB API endpoints triggered cascading failures across multiple services — from virtual servers (EC2) and load balancers to database connectivity.
Network-monitoring firm ThousandEyes confirmed that the issue originated in AWS’s core routing layer, disrupting traffic between dependent services and external clients.
As a result, dozens of websites and apps—including Venmo, Snapchat, Reddit, and Ring—faced partial or complete outages. Reuters reported that “businesses worldwide” experienced downtime during the multi-hour event.
Also Read: Verizon Outage Map Lights Up as Users Report Service Disruptions Across Major U.S. Cities
Venmo Users Hit Hard
Payment app Venmo, owned by PayPal, saw outage reports surge past 8,000 on Downdetector by mid-morning. Users reported login failures, pending transactions, and app timeouts across both iOS and Android.
While AWS said services were “fully operational by 3 p.m. PDT,” many Venmo users continued facing transaction delays and error messages into the evening. Tech reporters noted that the number of complaints began to drop significantly only after 6 p.m. ET, indicating a gradual recovery.
Venmo has not issued an independent statement clarifying the extent of the impact, but user data suggests the outage directly corresponded with AWS’s regional downtime.
When Will Venmo Be Back to Normal?
As of Tuesday morning, most Venmo functions — including peer-to-peer transfers, payment notifications, and balance viewing — appear to be restored. However, users may still experience intermittent slowdowns as AWS clears residual backlogs from queued processes and delayed database writes.
If your recent payment shows as “pending,” experts recommend waiting several hours before retrying, as duplicate submissions can occur during system re-syncs.
The Bigger Picture: A Fragile Digital Backbone
What makes this outage significant is not just Venmo’s downtime, but what it reveals about systemic risk in today’s internet architecture.
Cyber-infrastructure experts told The Guardian that the event demonstrates how dependent modern web services are on a few major cloud providers. When one region of AWS falters, the effects can ripple globally within minutes.
A similar sentiment was echoed by Business Insider, which called the incident “a reminder that even the most resilient networks can collapse from a single DNS configuration error.”
This growing centralization of cloud hosting has raised questions about digital resilience. For financial apps like Venmo, where uptime directly affects commerce, redundancy and failover planning are likely to become renewed priorities.
What Users Can Do Now
- Check your Venmo history: Confirm that pending transactions are processed before resending.
- Avoid multiple retries: Payment queues may duplicate if the first attempt is still syncing.
- Use alternate methods: For urgent transfers, fallback to direct bank payments until Venmo’s backend confirms full recovery.
- Stay updated: Monitor AWS’s Service Health Dashboard for further announcements.
AWS has since confirmed that “all affected services are operating normally,” though it has not shared full technical post-mortem details. Venmo transactions appear stable as of this morning, but intermittent slowness may persist for select users until synchronization completes across all servers.
For millions who rely on Venmo daily, this outage serves as a wake-up call: even the most trusted digital payment apps are only as strong as the cloud infrastructure that powers them.
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