Major AWS Outage Disrupts Services for Snapchat and Canva

Major AWS Outage Disrupts Popular Online Platforms

October 20, 2025

A significant disruption too Amazon Web Services (AWS) on October 20, 2025, caused widespread outages across several prominent online platforms. The AWS status page confirmed intermittent issues with multiple services, impacting a large number of users globally.

Initial reports indicated that snapchat, Roblox, canva, and Duolingo were among the first to experience service interruptions. Users reported difficulty accessing these platforms, with some experiencing complete outages. The incident underscores the critical reliance many online businesses have on AWS infrastructure.

Understanding the Scale of the Outage

The breadth of impact from this AWS outage is substantial. millions of individuals rely on the affected services for communication, entertainment, and education. A prolonged outage can lead to significant financial losses for these businesses, as well as frustration among their customer base.

According to data from Statista, AWS holds approximately 31% of the cloud infrastructure market as of Q3 2024, making it the dominant provider. This widespread dependency explains why an AWS issue can have such a cascading effect.

Did You Know? AWS has experienced several notable outages in recent years, prompting increased scrutiny of cloud infrastructure resilience.

Impacted Services and User Experiences

Snapchat users reported issues sending and receiving messages, while Roblox players encountered problems joining games. Canva experienced disruptions with its design platform, and duolingo users were unable to access language learning lessons. The outages varied in duration and severity across the platforms.

Platform	Reported Issues	Estimated Impact
Snapchat	Message Sending/Receiving	Millions of users affected
Roblox	Game Access/Connectivity	High player concurrency impacted
Canva	Design Platform Access	Significant disruption for designers
Duolingo	Lesson Access	Interruptions to learning progress

Pro Tip: Diversifying cloud providers or adopting multi-cloud strategies can help mitigate the risk of single-provider outages.

The Growing Reliance on Cloud Infrastructure

The incident serves as a stark reminder of the increasing dependence on cloud computing. As more businesses migrate their operations to the cloud, the potential impact of outages grows. This highlights the importance of robust disaster recovery and business continuity plans.

What measures do you think companies should take to ensure their services remain available during an AWS outage? How might these kinds of events influence future cloud infrastructure design?

Understanding Cloud Outages and Mitigation

cloud outages are not uncommon, even for industry leaders like AWS. They can result from various factors, including software bugs, hardware failures, network congestion, and human error. The complexity of modern cloud infrastructure makes it challenging to prevent all outages.

Businesses can mitigate the impact of cloud outages by implementing several strategies, including: redundancy, automated failover mechanisms, geographically diverse deployments, and comprehensive monitoring. Regular testing of disaster recovery plans is also crucial.

Frequently Asked Questions About AWS Outages

• What causes an AWS outage? AWS outages can stem from a variety of issues, including software bugs, hardware failures, and network problems.
• how does an AWS outage affect users? Users may experience difficulty accessing websites, applications, and other online services hosted on AWS.
• What is AWS doing to prevent future outages? AWS continually invests in improving the reliability and resilience of its infrastructure.
• Can businesses protect themselves from AWS outages? Yes, using strategies like multi-cloud setups and robust disaster recovery plans.
• What is the financial cost of an AWS outage? Outages can result in significant financial losses for businesses due to downtime and lost revenue.

Share this article and let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

What potential impact could a similar AWS outage have on businesses heavily reliant on SaaS applications?

The Scope of the October 2025 AWS Disruption

On October 20, 2025, a significant AWS outage impacted numerous services, most notably causing disruptions for popular platforms like Snapchat and Canva. The incident,which began around 14:00 UTC,affected users globally,highlighting the critical dependence many businesses have on Amazon Web Services for their infrastructure. Initial reports pointed to issues within the AWS US-East-1 region, a primary hub for many applications. This wasn’t a localized problem; the ripple effects were felt across dependent services and regions.

Impact on Snapchat

Snapchat, the popular social media platform, experienced widespread issues. Users reported:

* Inability to send or receive Snaps.

* Errors loading Stories.

* Complete app crashes.

* Difficulty logging into accounts.

The outage severely hampered core functionality, impacting millions of daily active users. SnapchatS reliance on AWS for its backend infrastructure – including storage, compute, and database services – meant the AWS service disruption directly translated to a degraded user experience. The incident underscored the importance of cloud resilience and disaster recovery planning for social media platforms.

Canva’s Service Degradation

Canva, the graphic design platform, also suffered significant disruptions. Users encountered:

* Slow loading times for the Canva editor.

* Errors when attempting to save designs.

* Inability to access templates and design assets.

* Problems with collaboration features.

For Canva,which serves a large base of professional and casual designers,the outage meant lost productivity and potential missed deadlines. the incident highlighted the vulnerability of SaaS applications to underlying infrastructure failures. Cloud computing outages can have a direct financial impact on businesses relying on these platforms.

Root Cause Analysis (Preliminary Findings)

While Amazon has not released a definitive root cause analysis as of this writing, early indications suggest the outage stemmed from a cascading failure within the AWS networking infrastructure in the US-East-1 region. Specifically,issues with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) and Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) were reported.

* S3 Outage: problems with S3, a core object storage service, likely impacted applications relying on it for storing images, videos, and other critical data.

* EC2 Instability: Instability within EC2, the virtual server service, led to instances becoming unavailable, further exacerbating the problem.

* Cascading Effect: The initial issue appears to have triggered a cascading effect, impacting other AWS services and ultimately leading to the widespread disruptions.

Experts speculate that a configuration error or a software bug within the networking layer may have been the initial trigger. The complexity of modern cloud infrastructure makes pinpointing the exact cause challenging and requires thorough inquiry.

AWS Mitigation Strategies & Recovery

Amazon’s engineering teams worked swiftly to mitigate the impact of the outage. Key steps taken included:

1. Failover to Healthy Regions: Where possible, traffic was rerouted to other AWS regions with available capacity. This is a core principle of multi-region deployment and high availability.
2. Capacity Scaling: AWS rapidly scaled capacity in unaffected regions to absorb the increased load.
3. Service Restoration: Engineers focused on restoring functionality to the affected services in US-East-1, addressing the underlying networking issues.
4. Monitoring & Stabilization: Post-restoration, AWS implemented enhanced monitoring to ensure stability and prevent recurrence.

The recovery process took several hours, with services gradually returning to normal operation throughout the afternoon and evening of October 20th.The incident served as a stark reminder of the importance of robust incident management procedures.

Lessons Learned & Best Practices for Cloud Resilience

This AWS service failure provides valuable lessons for businesses relying on cloud infrastructure:

* multi-Region Deployment: Deploying applications across multiple AWS regions is crucial for ensuring high availability and minimizing the impact of regional outages.

* Robust Disaster Recovery Plan: A well-defined and regularly tested disaster recovery plan is essential for quickly restoring services in the event of an outage.

* Monitoring & Alerting: Implement extensive monitoring and alerting systems to detect and respond to issues proactively. Utilize cloud monitoring tools to gain visibility into your infrastructure.

* Dependency Mapping: Understand the dependencies between your applications and AWS services. This helps identify potential points of failure.

* Vendor Diversification (consideration): While not always feasible, consider diversifying your cloud providers to reduce reliance on a single vendor.

* Automated Failover: Implement automated failover mechanisms to automatically switch traffic to healthy regions in the event of an outage.

The Future of Cloud Reliability

The october 2025 AWS outage underscores the ongoing need for improvements in cloud infrastructure reliability. Amazon Web Services, along with other major cloud providers, are continually investing in redundancy, automation, and advanced monitoring