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Image: Envato
A major worldwide outage has hit several of the biggest websites and apps this morning, with major names such as Snapchat, Roblox, Canva, and Duolingo all suffering downtime.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud provider behind many of these platforms, is at fault for the disruption. It began reporting faults across multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 region at midnight Pacific Time, with the underlying DNS issue fully mitigated by 3AM PDT.
However, three hours later, Amazon reported new API and connectivity issues, with further investigation underway to resolve them.
Even after mitigation efforts, services running on AWS are expected to remain unstable for a few hours due to traffic spikes and other technical factors. Beyond the thousands of apps, games, and websites affected, some of Amazon’s own services also went down during the outage.
Amazon’s retail site was unavailable for several hours, as was its Ring doorbell system. Delivery drivers in the UK reported that Amazon warehouses were unable to sign off on packages due to technical faults.
AWS is the largest cloud computing provider in the world and underpins a vast array of apps, websites, and infrastructure used every day. Alongside Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, the three companies control over 60 percent of the global cloud infrastructure market, making them critical to the continuous operation of the web and mobile services.
While such outages are rare, they raise questions about the heavy reliance on just three providers, all based in the United States. Even the UK government, which has been pushing for national cloud development, saw its tax portal go offline during the outage, highlighting the lack of strong national alternatives to the “big three” in Europe.
Another issue the outage exposed was how little redundancy many services have for major disruptions. Even large-scale apps with hundreds of millions of users, such as Snapchat and Duolingo, were offline for hours, unable to divert traffic to a backup provider. It is the first time in a while that AWS has experienced an outage of this scale.
EDIT: By 3:01 PM PDT on October 20, Amazon said all AWS services returned to normal operations. It added, “Some services such as AWS Config, Redshift, and Connect continue to have a backlog of messages that they will finish processing over the next few hours. We will share a detailed AWS post-event summary.”
In December 2021, a widespread outage hit the same region, disrupting multiple services connected to AWS. A smaller outage in July 2024 affected far fewer services, primarily hitting Amazon’s Ring camera system.
The other two major providers have also suffered significant outages in the past two years. Earlier this year, in June, Google Cloud experienced a widespread disruption that affected popular apps such as Spotify and Discord. In July 2024, Microsoft Azure was hit by a DDoS attack that lasted several hours, taking many Azure-based apps and services offline.
In happier news from last month, Amazon wrapped up its fall 2025 hardware event, which included a deeper look at Alexa+ and the new Amazon Echo.