A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) incident on October 20, 2025 has put offline or degraded dozens of popular apps and websites across the globe — including Canva, Amazon’s own services, Fortnite, and Snapchat. AWS reported elevated error rates in US-EAST-1 (N. Virginia) that cascaded into worldwide problems. Most platforms began recovering within a few hours.
What exactly went down?
Reports and outage trackers flagged issues for a long list of consumer apps and business tools. Among the most visible:
- Snapchat, Fortnite, Roblox, Duolingo, Coinbase, Robinhood, Venmo — intermittent logins, broken feeds or total downtime.
- Canva and other creation/productivity tools had access and loading failures as calls to AWS services timed out.
- Amazon’s own ecosystem — parts of Amazon.com, Prime Video, Alexa, Ring, Kindle — struggled during the incident window.
Outage tracking sites showed the first big spike shortly after 3:11 a.m. ET; AWS posted “significant signs of recovery” by around 5:27 a.m. ET, with many apps declaring full recovery not long after. Some AWS components still showed knock-on impact later in the morning.
Why did so many services break at once?
When a core cloud region hiccups, apps that depend on it for compute, storage, identity, API gateways and DNS can feel the pain, even if users are halfway around the world. In this case, AWS status messages and news reports identified US-EAST-1 as the epicenter. Associated DNS problems were also reported, compounding reachability and routing issues for dependent apps. Importantly, there’s no evidence of a cyberattack at this time.
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How long did it last?
From first alerts to meaningful recovery, the core disruption lasted roughly 3–4 hours, with residual blips for some services beyond that window. Timelines vary by platform, but most of the big names were stabilizing by early morning US time.
Key quotes & context
- AWS acknowledged “increased error rates and latencies” and said engineers were mitigating and restoring affected services. More on Reuters
- Reporters and trackers noted it as one of the most significant internet disruptions since the 2024 CrowdStrike incident that crippled parts of global infrastructure — a reminder of the web’s reliance on a few big cloud providers.
- Tech outlets highlighted the familiar pattern: past US-EAST-1 incidents in 2020, 2021 and 2023 have produced similarly wide ripple effects, underscoring reliability pressure on hyperscale clouds.
FAQ
Was Canva down because of AWS?
Likely yes — outlets listed Canva among services impacted during the AWS incident window, consistent with error spikes seen on trackers.
Why did Fortnite and Snapchat fail at the same time?
Both rely on AWS infrastructure; when US-EAST-1 stumbled, dependent logins, APIs and content delivery broke.
Was it a hack?
There’s no indication of a cyberattack. Reports point to AWS service/DNS issues and recovery actions by AWS engineers.
Are things fully fixed now?
By mid-morning US time, most apps reported recovery, though some AWS services still showed residual impact. Always verify with each app’s status page.
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