Millions of users worldwide were temporarily locked out of their social lives and language lessons on Monday, October 20, 2025, as a significant technical failure at Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused a cascade of outages across the digital landscape.

Popular platforms like Snapchat, the language-learning app Duolingo, and numerous other major online services reported severe disruptions, underscoring the centralised and fragile nature of the modern internet.

The issues began surging globally in the early morning hours (US Pacific Time), with users reporting widespread inability to log in, send messages, load content, or complete lessons.

The Core Problem: A Glitch in the Cloud Backbone

The root of the global disruption was quickly traced back to a critical issue within one of the key regional data centers operated by Amazon Web Services in the US-EAST-1 Region (North Virginia).

AWS is the world’s largest provider of cloud computing infrastructure, acting as the digital backbone for countless companies—from social media giants to banking apps and gaming networks.

AWS officially acknowledged the incident on its service status page, confirming “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services,” specifically naming essential functions like Amazon DynamoDB (a key database service) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which companies rent for server operations. A failure in this single core region had a ripple effect that crippled platforms relying on its services globally.

The User Impact: Streaks, Snaps, and Trading Halts

The outage translated into immediate, frustrating problems for users:

Snapchat Users: Thousands reported failures to log in or load their feeds, sparking fears among the highly engaged user base of losing their long-running Snap Streaks. The app, which relies heavily on real-time data exchange, was severely hampered.
Duolingo Students: The disruption threatened the meticulous language learning streaks that motivate millions of Duolingo users daily, leaving them unable to complete their lessons and preserve their progress.
Wider Net: The outage was not isolated, also affecting major platforms in gaming (Roblox, Fortnite), work collaboration (Canva, Slack), and finance (Coinbase, Robinhood), momentarily pausing major segments of global digital commerce and communication.

The Takeaway: Vulnerability of Centralization

While AWS engineers were reported to be “actively engaged” in mitigating the issue and restoring full functionality, the event has reignited debate among tech analysts about the world’s deep reliance on a few dominant cloud providers.

Experts stress that while AWS offers incredible scale and efficiency, a single technical glitch in one of its primary regions can effectively “pause the internet” for a vast portion of the digital economy. Though there was viral speculation of a potential cyberattack, officials have maintained that the issue appears to stem from an internal infrastructure fault.

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