Massive AWS Outage Halt The Internet – Disrupting Snapchat, Prime Video, Canva, and More

An outage believed to be caused by a DNS resolution failure struck Amazon Web Services on 20 October 2025, beginning at 12:11 a.m. PDT in AWS’s US-East-1 region in Northern Virginia and knocking several major platforms offline, including Snapchat, Amazon Prime Video and Canva. The disruption cascaded to core services such as EC2 and S3, freezing apps, websites and critical services for millions of users worldwide. By 3:00 a.m.

ET, outage trackers recorded tens of thousands of complaints as Snapchat messages stalled, Prime Video streams buffered and Canva projects became inaccessible. The incident highlighted AWS’s role as a global cloud provider, with US-East-1 described as a regional hub hosting over 100 data centres and routing traffic for many international services.

Experts urged diversification of digital infrastructure and consideration of multi-cloud or hybrid strategies to reduce single-provider reliance, while regulators could push for tighter oversight given the sectors affected, including finance and healthcare.