AWS Outage Sparks Global Chaos, Disrupting Snapchat, Canva, and Major Brands

An AWS outage disrupts major apps and websites globally, including Snapchat, Canva, Fortnite, Roblox, and key banking and Amazon services.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest cloud computing platform, is currently facing a major global outage that has disrupted several leading apps, websites, and enterprise systems.

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The downtime has affected Amazon, Snapchat, Fortnite, Roblox, Canva, and other platforms relying on AWS infrastructure. Popular services such as Perplexity, Airtable, and the McDonald’s app have also reported increased error rates and latency.

Even banking institutions, including Lloyds, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland, are experiencing service disruptions due to their dependency on AWS-hosted systems.

What Happened: AWS Faces Critical Service Disruption

According to the AWS Service Health Dashboard, multiple services are “impacted” due to operational issues in the US-EAST-1 region, one of Amazon’s core data hubs.

The company confirmed it is “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services”, though ripple effects have already been reported in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

This region has historically been the most vulnerable, with similar outages occurring in 2020, 2021, and 2023, each time causing hours of downtime for critical online services and digital platforms.

Widespread Impact Across Industries

• Tech & Entertainment: Platforms like Snapchat, Fortnite, and Roblox are facing connection errors and slow response times.
• Design & Productivity Tools: Canva and Airtable users are reporting issues with saving or publishing projects.
• Finance: Lloyds Banking Group, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland customers are encountering login and transaction delays.
• Amazon Services: Prime Video, Alexa, and Amazon.com have also been affected, with users noting Alexa’s inability to respond to commands or process requests.

The disruptions highlight how deeply interconnected modern digital ecosystems are, with thousands of businesses relying on AWS as their core infrastructure backbone.

AWS’s Ongoing Response

Its engineers are working to restore normal service levels, but the company has not provided an estimated recovery time. Historically, full recovery from US-EAST-1 outages can take several hours.

Analysts suggest this incident will likely renew discussions around cloud redundancy and data sovereignty, particularly among European financial institutions that depend on U.S.-based infrastructure.

For startups, enterprises, and developers across MENA and beyond, this outage is a sharp reminder of cloud dependence risks.

While it offers powerful scalability, such incidents underline the need for multi-cloud resilience strategies and localized data solutions to prevent business paralysis during regional downtime.