It’s a difficult Monday for many sites and web platforms that have suffered malfunctions and interruptions due to a problem that has affected them Amazon Web Service (AWS) which manages much of the back-end infrastructure (i.e. not visible to the end user and which deals with data processing and management of the basic logic of the Internet). In practice, AWS is Amazon’s cloud computing division and its infrastructure underlies the websites and platforms of hundreds of large companies.
Offline sites
As reported by DownDetector, the list of platforms that work poorly or are even impossible to reach is very large: these are Canva, Amazon (over 10 thousand reports in the United States alone), Clash Royale, Perplexity, Snapchat, Signal, Zoom, Prime Video, Ring, Fortnite, Airbnb, Amazon Alexa, Tim, Vodafone, Iliad, WhatsApp to give the most striking examples. As we can see, there is a certain heterogeneity as these are websites that deal with different topics and services (games, banks, telephony, other services, etc.) which are down not only in Italy but also in the United States and in the rest of the globe.
The note from AWS
“An issue has been detected that affects the stability of the website. We are experiencing an outage due to an AWS operational issue.” the company writes confirmed the network problem and the recording of errors “to various AWS services in the USA-East-1 region. QThis issue may also impact ticket creation through the AWS Help Center or Support API. We are actively working to mitigate the issue and understand its root cause. We will provide an update in 45 minutes or sooner if we have additional information to share.”
The causes
Upstream, the problem would start from DynamoDBa database service managed and provided by Amazon Web Services that supports key-value and document data structures and is designed to handle a wide range of applications that require scalability and performance. The causes, for now, are unknown: we therefore do not know if it is a bug, problems with cybercriminals or technical problems. “Wow, AWS went down and took away half the Internet.” wrote a user on X posting the screen of the companies mentioned above whose websites have enormous loading difficulties. Although some services began to recover as the hours passed, users on social media continued to have access problems.
Someone said GLOBAL AWS OUTAGE? Because it seems like everything is down.
Major AWS outage disrupts several services like Amazon, Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, Perplexity, Airtable, MyFitnessPal, Canva, and McDonald’s app due to high error rates and latencies. AWS is investigating;… pic.twitter.com/RbYXGUGENe
— Hackmanac (@H4ckmanac) October 20, 2025
The Canva note
Among the most famous platforms affected by the outages is Canvaan Australian multinational software company, which issued a note on the matter. “We are currently experiencing a significant increase in the number of errors that are impacting functionality on Canva. Our team is actively investigating the issue and working to restore full access as quickly as possible“. On the social network Reddit Many users report that the Alexa smart assistant is down and unable to answer questions or complete requests.
The precedents
AWS outages in
US-East-1 region, like today, have already caused widespread disruption in 2023, 2021 and 2020 forcing numerous websites and platforms to remain offline for several hours before regular service was restored.