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The outage that brought the internet to a grinding halt  October 22, 2025

 

What's up, Sunshine? Welcome to the show. I'm Coy Wire. This is CNN 10 and it is Your Word Wednesday.

 

We chose one of the words you submitted to help make us smarter today and write the show, so listen up.

 

Now, our lead story of the day is that global internet outage that turned most of our digital worlds upside down earlier this week. Many of us had trouble surfing social media, shopping online, maybe even checking our bank accounts on Monday.

 

That's because the world's biggest internet cloud server, Amazon Web Services, was down. AWS powers some of the world's most popular websites and apps and its outage disrupted the daily activities of businesses and individuals alike. You should have seen it here at CNN headquarters.

 

Producers of show teams were scrambling to find videos and photos that they could use rather than just have their news anchors on camera the entire time because the system, it just wasn't working. Thousands of companies and millions of users around the world were impacted. Our Claire Duffy has more. Hi, Claire.

 

Hey, Coy. Yeah, this outage was a real wake-up call about just how reliant so much of the internet has become on a small number of core infrastructure providers.

 

We just sort of accept it as normal at this point that if companies want to start a website or an app, they're probably not hosting it on their own computers or servers. Instead, millions of companies rent that server space from Amazon Web Services. And most of the time, that makes life easier and cheaper and more secure for those companies unless you have an outage like we saw on Monday.

 

And then you have this sort of single point of failure that comes from the cloud computing provider and the widespread disruption that we saw on Monday. I mean, I, for one, was unable to order my Starbucks on the app or play the Wordle, but the disruption was much more significant. We saw flight delays.

 

We saw students unable to access the software they need for school or workers unable to do their jobs normally, people unable to pay for things online or in person, people unable to make doctor's appointments.

 

And this happened globally. That's why the financial impact of this outage is expected to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars in lost consumer spending and lost productivity.

 

Now, Amazon isn't the only player in this market, but it is the largest cloud computing provider. It serves around 4 million customers, holds around 37% of this cloud computing market. And if you take into account the other two big players, Microsoft and Google, between those three companies, they hold 60% of the cloud computing market.

 

That is just a massive swath of the internet that is dependent on these three companies. Now, Amazon does say that its services should be back up and running normally, and we do hope to get more information from the company on exactly what the root cause of this outage was. Back to you.

 

Pop quiz, hot shot.The White House wasn't always called the White House. Which US president made the name official?

 

Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, or Thomas Jefferson? If you said Teddy, very good.

 

The 26th president made the now iconic name official in 1901. Previous names included Executive Mansion and the President's House.

 

US President Donald Trump is overseeing a massive construction project at the White House.

 

oversee [ˋovɚˋsi] v. 监督；管理；看管

 

Demolition of the East Wing began yesterday. It will be replaced by a 90,000 square foot ballroom with a $200 million budget. The East Wing has traditionally hosted the first lady's offices like Betty Ford and both Barbara and Laura Bush.

 

demolition [͵dɛməˋlɪʃən] n. 建築物拆

host [host] v. to perform the duties or functions of a host

 

The project follows other renovations earlier this year, including a giant flagpole and a paved patio that replaced the iconic Rose Garden.

 

patio [ˋpɑtɪ͵o] v.【西】天井；露台

 

President Trump says the ballroom will be, quote, completely separate from the White House itself and the theme and architectural heritage of the mansion will be kept. The project is being funded by private donors rather than taxpayer dollars.

 

White House's communications director has pushed back against critics saying, quote, construction has always been a part of the evolution of the White House.

 

Next up,huge news for a country that has one of the world's largest economies. For the first time in Japan's history, a woman has become prime minister.

 

Sane Takahichi, a conservative, won both houses of parliament during Tuesday's votes. She is now assembling her cabinet and getting ready for her first news conference as premier.

 

Takahichi is inheriting a number of economic challenges, including record high inflation, a shrinking workforce, and new tariffs or taxes on goods put in place by the United States.

 

Takahichi-san takes office just days before U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to visit.

 

Question for all of you out there with an affinity for the supernatural or the mysterious or just downright weird.

 

affinity [əˋfɪnətɪ] n. 喜好，本性，倾向

 

Ever hear of Mothman? Nearly 60 years ago, residents of Point Pleasant, West Virginia reported seeing an enigmatic and, quite frankly, frightening visitor, a seven foot tall creature with massive wings and shining red eyes.

 

enigmatic [͵ɛnɪgˋmætɪk] adj. 如谜的；难以理解的

 

People were bugging out so much over these widespread reports that some schools were even closing. Some residents claim they came face to face with Mothman. Others say it was all a hoax.

 

hoax [hoks] n. 骗局；玩笑；恶作剧

 

Decades later, the creepy cryptid's legacylives on and folks from all over flock to the town and to the Mothman Museum to learn more about the legend.

 

cryptid [ˈkrɪptɪd] n. 科学尚未证实存在的生物- 雪人、蛾人、尼斯湖水怪，等等

live on 继续存活; 继续存在

 

The Mothman story started here in Point Pleasant in November of 1966. You had two young couples riding around on the outskirts of town in what was called the TNT area.

 

That was an old ammunitions depot back in World War II. When the war ended, they just left all the buildings and structures. They saw what they thought was just a person standing in the road and then they saw the wingspan come out.

 

It was flying behind the car. They were hitting speeds of about 85-90 miles an hour. The more people started reporting these different sightings, the elementary schools wouldn't let the kids out for a while because they thought if it was a bird big enough to come and pick up a kid, there were really no solid answers.

 

You had over 100 reported sightings within the next two years.

 

My brother, he was going to go try to find that thing because he decided he was going to go prove it was fake. It jumped up on top of the hood and just crouched there.

 

crouch [ˋkraʊtʃ] vi. 蹲伏；弯腰；蜷伏

 

If that windshield wasn't there, all I had to do was reach out and I could touch him or he could have reached in and touched us. It just went off like that and then gone.

 

I was five years old, you know, when all this was going on.

 

It's kind of fascinating that, you know, my hometown had a monster or a big bird creature. The museum, I started in 2006. There were different theories.

 

Some people thought this was an extraterrestrial type thing, a large barn owl or a sandhill crane.

 

extraterrestrial [͵ɛkstrətəˋrɛstrɪəl] adj. 地球之外的；外星人的

 

If anybody knows what a crane looks like, this thing had a human form. That's a far shape from a crane. So it made us mad.

 

The majority of people live here in Point Pleasant. They've embraced it.

 

The museum, the Mothman statue, the legend has revitalized the town. It's helped the economy, the restaurants, retail shops.

 

It's a thing. People do this. Why is this a thing? I don't know. People do this.

 

It continues to attract visitors from literally all over the world. People would like an answer to what happened. There's thousands who come to Point Pleasant every year to go to the TNT area to look for Mothman.

 

People see amazing and weird things some people do in their life and those want to some kind of bad and never do. So I guess that's why they want to hear this story.

 

All right, today's story getting a 10 out of 10.

 

A New Hampshire town turning gourds into gondolas every fall. The Piscatagua River through downtown Goffstown welcomes the pumpkin regatta.

 

gourd [gord] n. 葫芦属植物；葫芦；葫芦制成的容器

gondola [ˋgɑndələ] n.（用于意大利威尼斯运河的）平底狭长小船

regatta [rɪˋgætə] n.（源出意大利威尼斯的）凤尾船比赛；帆船比赛；赛船大会

 

It's amazing that this many people show up to watch people paddle a pumpkin.

 

As long as the pumpkin weighs at least 1,000 pounds, it'll keep their captains afloat and everything will be just vine.

 

But oh my gourdness, the competition can be arduous and it can get seedy.

 

arduous [ˋɑrdʒʊəs] adj. 艰巨的；费力的；困难的

seedy [ˋsidɪ] adj. 脏兮兮的; 褴褛的

 

How did you pull through as the winner?

 

pull through (使)度过危机(或难关等)

 

I couldn't feel my arms, but there's no way I was letting him win. I'm way too competitive.

 

If those boats sprung a leak, I guess they could just get a pumpkin patch to fix them.

 

Congrats to our Your Word Wednesday winners Mrs. Burney and our Red Aces friends at Buckland High School in Kansas for submitting arduous, an adjective meaning involving or requiring strenuous effort.

 

strenuous [ˋstrɛnjʊəs] adj. 费劲的，费力的

 

I'll be at the University of Kansas for TNT to do sideline reporting for the big Kansas, Kansas State rivalry football game this weekend.

 

sideline [ˋsaɪd͵laɪn] n. 局外人的观点

 

Our shout out of the day goes to Mr. Sanchez at Alhambra High School in Alhambra, California. Thank you for your letters and the cool swag bag.

 

We appreciate you. I hope you have an awesome day. I'm hungry, so I'm going to get something to eat.

 

I'm Coy Wire and we are CNN 10.