Major AWS Outage (Oct 20 2025) — Why Snapchat, Canva & Other Services Went Down

The Problem: Widespread Outage Across Major Apps & Services

On Monday, October 20 2025, users across the world began experiencing unexpected downtime and functionality issues on several popular apps including Snapchat, Canva, Roblox, Duolingo, and even Amazon’s own Prime and Alexa services. Tracking websites like Downdetector showed huge spikes in outage reports, confirming that this wasn’t an isolated issue but a major global incident.

According to The Verge and Dataconomy, the cause was traced to a major disruption in Amazon Web Services (AWS)—specifically the US-East-1 region (North Virginia)—where several of AWS’s core services were experiencing “increased error rates and latencies.”

Which Services Were Affected?

• Snapchat – Users were unable to log in, send messages, or access snaps. The outage was global and caused temporary login and message delivery failures.
• Canva – The popular design platform suffered a major outage affecting almost every key function, from editing to downloading and even mobile apps.
• Roblox & Fortnite – Gamers reported crashes, long load times, and broken sessions.
• Duolingo – Lessons failed to load or sync due to backend API timeouts.
• Amazon Prime, Alexa & AWS Console – Even Amazon’s internal services were impacted due to dependencies within their own infrastructure.

Canva’s Major Outage

Canva’s status page confirmed that the platform was facing significantly increased error rates affecting nearly every feature:

• Login & Signup: Major outage
• Editing, Viewing, and Saving Designs: Major outage
• Downloading & Sharing: Major outage
• Uploads, Billing, API, and Canva AI Connector: Major outage
• Mobile and Desktop Apps: iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows apps all affected
• LMS Integrations: Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle, Google Classroom, and MS Teams integrations down

Here’s Canva’s official update timeline (AEDT):

19:16 — “We are currently experiencing significantly increased error rates which are impacting functionality on Canva. Our team is actively investigating and working to restore full access as quickly as possible.”

19:14 — Similar message repeated as issues persisted across all major components.

18:14 — Initial report: “We’re aware that Canva and its features are currently unavailable for some users. Our team is actively investigating the issue.”

Every critical function—from login to editing to file export—was marked as a “Major Outage” on their dashboard, showing the severity of the AWS disruption’s ripple effect.

Why This Happened: The AWS Dependency

Amazon Web Services hosts critical backend infrastructure for thousands of popular web applications. When AWS’s US-East-1 region experiences downtime, the ripple effect spreads across the internet. This particular incident affected essential AWS services like EC2 (compute), DynamoDB (database), and CloudFront (content delivery network). Apps like Snapchat, Canva, and Duolingo depend heavily on these systems.

According to The Guardian, AWS confirmed it was “investigating increased error rates” across multiple services in the North Virginia region, leading to degraded performance worldwide.

Impact on Users

• Users could not log in or send snaps on Snapchat
• Canva users lost access to design editing, downloading, and AI-assisted tools
• Streaming and gaming platforms like Prime and Roblox faced downtime
• Even business dashboards and developer tools on AWS Console went offline temporarily

What Can Users Do?

Unfortunately, with outages of this scale, the only solution is patience. The issue lies deep in the infrastructure layer, not in your device or app. You can, however:

• Monitor the AWS Service Health Dashboard or app-specific status pages (e.g., Canva, Snapchat).
• Refrain from reinstalling apps or clearing data — this won’t solve the issue.
• Stay connected via official Twitter or X handles for service updates.

Key Takeaways for Developers & Teams

• Multi-region redundancy is essential. Don’t rely solely on one AWS region for critical workloads.
• Use multi-cloud architecture where possible (e.g., combining AWS, GCP, or Azure for failover).
• Communicate fast and clearly with your users during downtime — Canva’s status updates are a great example of transparency under pressure.

Conclusion

The October 20 2025 AWS outage was one of the largest cloud disruptions this year, affecting major platforms like Snapchat, Canva, and others. It highlights both the strength and fragility of modern internet infrastructure—where a single point of failure can ripple across millions of users and businesses worldwide.

As of now, AWS engineers are working to stabilize all affected services, while app providers continue restoring full functionality. For users, the best move is to stay patient and informed; for developers, it’s a reminder to build systems with resilience and redundancy in mind.

Read more on The Verge | View Canva’s Status | AWS Health Dashboard