Global AWS Outage Today: What Went Down, What’s Back, and Why So Many Apps Broke at Once

A major AWS outage today disrupted vast swaths of the internet, knocking popular apps and everyday services offline for hours. Issues began in the early U.S. morning (ET) and cascaded worldwide, with user reports peaking across North America, Europe, and parts of Asia-Pacific. While many systems are recovering, some customers are still seeing errors, slow logins, or delayed notifications as traffic backlogs clear.

AWS outage today: the latest status

AWS indicates services are recovering after widespread elevated error rates and latency tied to the US-EAST-1 (Northern Virginia) region. Even if your app isn’t hosted there, dependencies on global control planes and shared tooling meant knock-on effects elsewhere. As recovery proceeds, expect sporadic failures—timeouts, stuck logins, missing push alerts—until caches refresh and queues drain.

Key points right now

• Core disruption centered on US-EAST-1, with spillover to dependent services in other regions.

• No credible evidence of a cyberattack; indicators point to an internal AWS issue.

• Recovery is underway, but residual issues can persist for hours as DNS caches and message queues catch up.

What caused the AWS outage?

Early technical notes reference an internal subsystem tied to health monitoring for network load balancers, alongside DNS resolution side effects that made healthy services appear unreachable. In practical terms, that broke the “traffic cop” layer many apps rely on, causing connection failures, timeouts, and failed launches of replacement resources. Formal post-mortems usually follow later; for now, treat the cause as internal AWS service malfunction rather than external interference.

What apps and websites were down?

The incident touched thousands of properties. Impact varied by region and architecture, but these categories saw the heaviest, most visible issues:

• Social & messaging: Snapchat (logins, snaps failing to send), Reddit (rate-limit errors), status pages and support tools throttled.

• Education: Canvas (LMS used by schools/colleges) experienced a major outage for many U.S. institutions; assignment submissions and logins were blocked during peak class hours.

• Design & productivity: Canva, document automation, workflow tools, and meeting services saw partial outages or degraded performance.

• Finance & crypto: Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, and bank portals showed login/payment delays; some features were disabled as a safety measure.

• Gaming & entertainment: Fortnite, Roblox, and various game launchers went dark or unstable; smart-home features such as doorbells and assistants also glitched.

• Retail & utilities: Some e-commerce, delivery, transit, and university portals timed out or displayed maintenance screens.

“Is Snapchat down right now?”

Snapchat experienced a significant interruption tied to the AWS incident. Many users reported login failures, messages not sending, and Stories not loading. Service is improving, but lingering issues may affect notifications and media uploads as the platform clears backlogs.

“Is Canvas down?” (and Canvas vs. Canva)

• Canvas (LMS): Yes—Canvas had a major outage for customers linked to the impacted AWS region, including universities and school districts. Access, SSO, quizzes, and submissions were affected. Status has shifted to recovering, but some campuses may still see intermittent errors as authentication and integrations (e.g., Panopto, Kaltura) resync.

• Canva (design app): Also impacted during the peak window. Most users should see gradual restoration, with occasional slowdowns.

Does Amazon own Canvas? No. Canvas is provided by Instructure, which hosts on AWS. That’s why a cloud incident at AWS can take Canvas offline.

“Is Amazon down?”

Elements of Amazon’s own services—including retail components, smart-home, and streaming features—were intermittently disrupted. Many have stabilized, but some users may still encounter delays or retry loops until caches and edge locations fully refresh.

What to do if your app is still broken

Most fixes are on the provider side; avoid drastic steps. These user-level tweaks can help:

1. Check for official in-app banners before troubleshooting.

2. Force-quit and relaunch the app; on desktop, refresh with a hard reload.

3. Toggle airplane mode or briefly switch networks (cellular ↔ Wi-Fi) to refresh DNS.

4. Clear app/site cache (or try a private window) to pick up fresh endpoints.

5. Wait before retrying submissions to avoid duplicates once queues catch up.

6. For Canvas students: If a deadline was impacted, document the timestamp (screenshot) and contact your instructor; many institutions extend due times after widespread outages.

Why everything went down at once

The outage underscores how much of the internet runs on a handful of cloud platforms. Even when an app uses multiple regions, shared control planes, identity, DNS, and observability layers create common-mode risks. When those layers wobble, thousands of independent apps can fail together.

FAQs

Is AWS still down?
Core services are recovering. Some customers continue to see intermittent errors during the stabilization window.

When will AWS be fully back?
There’s no precise universal timestamp; restoration is service-by-service and region-by-region. Most consumer-facing apps tend to normalize within hours after AWS posts “mitigation in progress,” with stragglers as caches expire.

What caused the AWS outage?
Preliminary signals point to an internal health-monitoring subsystem affecting load balancers, with DNS knock-ons. Expect a detailed post-incident report later.

Was this a cyberattack?
There’s no verified indication of an attack. The evidence so far points to an operational failure inside AWS.

What does “US-EAST-1” mean?
It’s AWS’s Northern Virginia region, a major hub that many apps (and some global control functions) rely on.

Does this affect my data?
Outages of this type usually impact availability, not data integrity. Still, if you attempted payments, trades, or submissions during error windows, verify the outcome once services stabilize.

A global AWS outage originating in US-EAST-1 took down or degraded thousands of services—from Snapchat to Canvas—but systems are coming back online. If your app still misbehaves, expect gradual improvement as DNS, caches, and queues clear over the rest of the day.