Some of the world’s biggest apps and websites — including Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo, and Canva — experienced major disruptions on Sunday, 20 October, following a reported issue with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
According to Down Detector, complaints surged globally as users struggled to access popular platforms, online games, and even government services.
Amazon confirmed that the outage stemmed from problems affecting its North Virginia data centers, which disrupted services like Amazon DynamoDB and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) — key infrastructure that powers many online platforms.
The issues began around 8 a.m. UK time (midnight Pacific) and caused widespread slowdowns and connection failures across apps relying on AWS for cloud storage and computing.
According to outage tracker Down Detector, the disruption affected a wide range of popular platforms, including Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo, Canva, Clash Royale, Life360, MyFitnessPal, Xero, Amazon, Prime Video, Ring, Clash of Clans, Pokémon Go, Coinbase, Vodafone, HMRC, and PlayStation. The widespread issues highlight how dependent many major apps and services are on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Amazon said it is working to restore normal operations as quickly as possible.
