ZIMBABWE’S internet slowdown and disruptions experienced on October 19 and 20 were not the result of local service provider failures but part of a global internet outage caused by a major failure within Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest cloud computing platform.
The outage, which began in the early hours of October 19, 2025, crippled hundreds of popular websites and applications across the globe including Snapchat, Canva, HMRC, Roblox, Wordle, Strava, Fortnite and even major British banks such as Lloyds and Halifax.
Zimbabwean users attempting to access websites, emails or social media platforms reported widespread service failure, assuming local technical faults or government interference.
However, investigations have confirmed that the root cause lay far beyond Zimbabwe’s borders. According to Amazon Web Services, which controls three quarters of the world traffic, the problem originated from DNS resolution issues linked to its DynamoDB database system in the US-EAST-1 region (Virginia, US). This technical failure temporarily disabled essential servers that power thousands of websites and apps worldwide.
The impact was immediate and extensive. Millions of people were unable to access financial services, social media platforms, entertainment sites and cloud-based business tools such as Slack, Canva and Ring. Locally, businesses that depend on international cloud hosting or AWS-linked infrastructure also experienced disruptions affecting payments, customer logins and communication.
Amazon later announced that it was “seeing significant signs of recovery” after roughly three hours of downtime, though residual issues continued well into the day. The company confirmed “increased error rates” across multiple AWS services but assured users that full restoration was underway.
Experts say the incident demonstrates how global internet stability now depends heavily on a handful of large cloud providers. AWS, which powers a majority of global internet infrastructure, generated over US$108 billion last year and supports platforms far beyond Amazon’s own ecosystem.
For Zimbabwe, the outage is a reminder that even with improved local internet infrastructure, global connectivity remains vulnerable to failure thousands of kilometres away. As the digital economy expands, both local companies and government agencies are urged to consider regional data redundancy and backup strategies to avoid similar disruptions in the future.
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While AWS has since reported full recovery across most affected systems, the event indicates how we are at risk as the world increasingly depends on a centralised cloud systems and the ripple effects that can put nations like Zimbabwe temporarily offline.
