Dear Users,
We are writing to provide an update on the service disruptions you may have experienced earlier today, Monday, October 20, 2025. These issues were a direct result of a major outage affecting Amazon Web Services (AWS), our primary cloud hosting provider. The incident particularly impacted the US-East-1 region, where many of our systems are hosted.
What happened at AWS?
Amazon confirmed a significant outage within their US-East-1 region due to an underlying DNS (Domain Name System) issue. The DNS acts as the internet’s “phone book,” and the failure caused widespread connectivity problems for many services that depend on this AWS region, including Qualtrics.
This cascading failure took down many popular websites and services across the internet, not just our own. Amazon’s technical teams worked for several hours to resolve the issue, and operations have now largely returned to normal.
The specific impact on Qualtrics
Because of this dependency on AWS, the Qualtrics platform experienced its own service interruptions. You may have encountered one or more of the following issues:
- Platform access issues: Difficulty logging in or accessing the Qualtrics platform.
- Performance degradation: Slow loading times for dashboards and survey editing interfaces.
- Survey disruptions: A small number of users may have experienced issues with survey taking and distribution.
- Customer support issues: Our customer support channels were also impacted, temporarily preventing us from providing real-time updates and assistance.
Qualtrics’ response and resolution
Oualtrics technical teams immediately began investigating the root cause of the degraded performance. We closely monitored the AWS status pages throughout the incident and worked in parallel to ensure our own services returned to normal as soon as AWS restored its underlying infrastructure.
We can now confirm that service has been restored, and our platform is operating normally. We will continue to monitor the situation to ensure stability.
What happens next?
We understand the frustration and disruption that this type of event can cause for your business. Over the coming days, our team will conduct a full internal review to assess the impact and identify any potential improvements to our multi-region architecture and system resilience.
Our commitment to providing a reliable service is unwavering. We will follow up with a more detailed post-mortem as soon as our analysis is complete.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Sincerely,
Qualtrics Brand Admin