Monday, October 20, 2025, will go down in history as a day when a disruption in global digital infrastructure left millions of users without access to everyday services. A failure in the cloud giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) triggered a chain of effects that impacted virtual wallets in Latin America such as Mercado Pago, as well as platforms and applications that are part of the routine of millions of people.
During the morning of that day, AWS suffered a significant outage in its US-EAST-1 region (Virginia, USA), which began with high rates of error and latency, affecting multiple core services of its ecosystem. At the heart of the problem were systems like DynamoDB —AWS's database—and the domain name system (DNS), which translates page or app names into numerical addresses that computers can understand. This type of error inhibits applications from "finding" their servers and causes widespread failures.
In Argentina and other countries in the region, users of Mercado Pago reported being unable to make payments, transfers, or simply access certain functions of the app. Although the company did not issue a detailed public statement at the time, its status page confirmed that on the 20th, there were incidents related to payment processing. Given the dependence of platforms like Mercado Pago on cloud infrastructure, the parallel between the global AWS failure and the app's issues was inevitable. It is worth noting that the parent company of Mercado Pago, Mercado Libre, acknowledges using AWS to support its growth and technological operations.
The magnitude of the outage was shocking: it is estimated that more than 1,000 companies were directly affected, while diverse platforms such as Snapchat, Fortnite, Reddit, Duolingo, among many others, experienced failures at those moments. AWS reported that the problem originated from an internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the network load balancers within its EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service. Although the incident was not caused by a cyberattack – according to AWS – it highlights the fragility of such an interconnected infrastructure.
Regarding the recovery time, AWS indicated that by Monday afternoon it had already “restored most services” and that it would finish processing the backlog of queued messages in the following hours. Although most users were able to return to normal operations that same day, the incident caused delays in processing, specific inconveniences, and a loss of trust that is difficult to quantify.
The outage on October 20, 2025, reveals the close vulnerability of the digital services we rely on: when a cloud provider like AWS fails, the paralysis can be felt globally. Platforms such as Mercado Pago or virtual wallets rely on infrastructure that, although invisible to the end user, is critical. This incident underscores the need for companies to adopt resilience strategies —such as diversifying suppliers, creating redundancies, and maintaining transparency about failures—and reminds users that the digital environment, no matter how reliable it seems, is still exposed to massive disruptions. We must not forget about analog payments, at least for now. It's always good to have a little cash on hand.
Comments