On Oct. 20, 2025, a massive Amazon Web Services outage disrupted apps and websites worldwide, halting the normal operations of students, teachers and even airlines. Apps like Snapchat, Canvas, and Google Docs all struggled to load, leaving students and teachers scrambling to adjust. Even airline check-ins and banking systems were affected by this global outage.
According to Downdetector, a site that tracks internet problems, Amazon, Snapchat, Facebook and Delta Airlines were among the first hits. Air travel customers said they couldn’t check in for flights or see their reservations. In the U.K., customers from banks like Lloyds and Halifax reported login failures.
Amazon said the problem came from an internal system that checks the health of its network load balancers. At 4:26 a.m. ET, Amazon flagged a development of a widespread issue. The company explained that it was already working on fixes and later announced that AWS services were back to normal by 6:01 p.m. ET, although some systems still needed time to clear message backlogs.
The issue started in Amazon’s us-east-1 region, one of its largest data centers in Virginia. At 4:26 a.m. ET, Amazon flagged “significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint,” According to time.com, showing how one glitch in a single region could affect millions of users around the world.
The outage that hit U.S. cities the hardest, included New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, according to Downdetector data. Nearly half of all global reports came from the East Coast.
Gaming apps and websites like Fortnite, Roblox and Clash of Clans also saw spikes in outage reports. Social media platforms such as Snapchat, Facebook and Reddit were heavily affected, with Snapchat alone seeing more than 7,000 reports at its peak. Even Microsoft 365, Duolingo, Hinge, Ring Zoom and Slack users experienced disruptions.
On school campuses, the effects were easy to notice. Many students rely on cloud services like Canvas, Turnitin and Google Workspace—all of these services depend on AWS for hosting. Homework uploads stalled, emails failed to send and communication platforms became slower. Teachers had to adjust lessons, and students had to wait for services to come back online before finishing assignments or submitting work.
By late afternoon, most systems were back online, but schools and businesses were still catching up. The outage caused delays in grading, scheduling and digital communication. Some teachers reported losing progress on documents. Others needed to redo attendance or reset classroom activities once the systems loaded again.
The outage revealed how dependent daily life has become on cloud-based networks. It showed that a single technical problem can interrupt routines across education, travel and banking. From schools to banks, airlines, and entertainment platforms, much of modern life now relies on systems managed by a single company. For many people, the outage served as a reminder that he tools that we use every day can fail without warning.