Global AWS Outage Affects Popular Platforms, Including Snapchat And Canva

A major outage at Amazon Web Services disrupted many of the world’s most popular websites and apps this morning. Services including Snapchat, Signal, Canva, Fortnite and even the UK’s tax authority HMRC went offline for hours. According to Down Detector, the problems started around 9 a.m. CET, with most of the issues centred in the United States, especially in northern Virginia where AWS hosts its main servers.

Steve Sandford, Partner – Digital Forensics and Incident Response, CyXcel, said: “The AWS outage on 20 October 2025 was one of the most disruptive in recent memory, affecting a wide range of services globally.

“Triggered by a failure in the US-EAST-1 region, the incident primarily impacted DynamoDB, a core database service, which led to cascading issues across authentication, data access, and backend operations.”

The company explained that the fault was linked to its Domain Name System, which connects website names to IP addresses. This problem caused users to lose access to apps, banking sites, even airport systems. At 12:35 p.m. CET, AWS said it had “fully mitigated” the problem and that most services were back to normal.

During the outage, users across Europe, North America, and parts of Asia reported being unable to log in to or load their usual apps. Many companies took to X to confirm they were affected. Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange, told its customers that all funds were safe, while AI startup Perplexity’s CEO Aravind Srinivas said their system was also down due to AWS issues.

Which Websites And Apps Were Affected?

The list of affected platforms was extensive. Sandford said: “Major platforms such as Amazon.com, Prime Video, Snapchat, Coinbase, and UK services like HMRC and Lloyds Bank experienced significant downtime. The outage disrupted everything from banking and e-commerce to gaming and education, with millions of users unable to access essential services.”

Down Detector also confirmed that users struggled to access Amazon, Prime Video, Canva, Duolingo, Fortnite, Roblox, PlayStation, Slack and Microsoft Teams. Financial and telecom services such as Venmo, Robinhood, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile were also impacted. Even Zoom and workplace tool Asana experienced issues during the same period.

In Europe, the outage extended to government and telecom services. In France, users from SFR and Free reported failures and in the UK, HMRC’s online tax portal went down. The New York Times reported that the problem also reached airport systems, causing long queues at LaGuardia Airport in New York when check-in kiosks stopped working.

At its worst, the AWS status page showed more than 80 of Amazon’s own services were affected. Thousands of complaints flooded Down Detector before the numbers started to go down later in the day. While the full system recovery took hours, AWS said most of its services were “succeeding normally” by the afternoon.

How Does AWS Work, And Why Does It Matter So Much?

AWS powers a huge portion of the internet that allows companies to rent cloud storage and computing power instead of building their own data centres. This model has made AWS one of the most important backbones of the online world. From small startups to major corporations, many rely on AWS to keep their websites and apps running.

So, even a single technical issue at AWS can impact platforms around the globe. Northern Virginia, where the fault began, hosts one of the largest concentrations of data centres worldwide. When one of those servers goes down, it can cause chain reactions across continents within minutes.

Something similar happened in July last year, when cybersecurity company CrowdStrike caused a global IT breakdown affecting hospitals, banks, airlines, and government offices. These repeated events have raised questions about the world’s dependence on a few massive tech infrastructure providers.

What Are The Lessons From This Outage?

Experts say the outage has once again shown how fragile online systems can be when too much depends on one provider. Cori Crider, executive director of the Future of Technology Institute, told Euronews that Europe’s “dependency on monopoly cloud companies like Amazon” is both an economic and security risk. She urged European countries to support local cloud providers to protect their systems from large-scale disruptions.

Sandford concluded: “The risks associated with such outages are substantial: operational downtime, revenue loss, compliance breaches, and reputational damage are common consequences for businesses.

“Moreover, the centralisation of services in a few key regions creates single points of failure, making even localised issues capable of causing global disruption.

“The October 2025 AWS outage underscores the critical dependency many organisations have on cloud providers. While major cloud providers remain robust and trusted platforms, businesses must consider multi-region architectures, failover strategies, and even multi-cloud solutions to mitigate future risks. As cloud adoption continues to grow, so too must the resilience strategies that support it.”