Snapchat, Canva, Signal, Perplexity & many apps down, AWS outage appears to be cause

Services of Snapchat, Canva, Signal, Perplexity, Duolingo, and Open AI —website and apps used by millions every day across the world— were down on Monday. The disruption appears to be linked to an outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

In a brief notification, AWS said it was seeing “increased error rates” and delays with “multiple AWS services”, according to The Independent.

The update said that AWS is experiencing problems at its facilities in north Virginia and issues are affecting Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud — services  that allow other companies to rent storage and computers to run their platforms.

Other major services that have reported outages are Amazon, Prime Video, Spotify, Claude, Coinbase, Zoom, and Reddit, according to Down Detector.

In a statement, Coinbase said the disruption of its services was linked to issues with the AWS.

“We’re aware many users are currently unable to access Coinbase due to an AWS outage,” said Coinbase.

In the United Kingdom, the outages were first reported at around 8 am local time, according to The Independent.

The AWS is a tech giant that provides critical infrastructure that hosts and powers a large chunk of the world’s internet. A host of websites and services big and small use AWS services ranging from virtual servers that run applications to storing their websites’ content like images, videos, and backups. Therefore, any outage at AWS is bound to affect clients relying on its services like virtual servers or cloud storage.

Earlier this year, a similar outage had hit AWS that took some of the most widely used websites and apps offline. Google was said to be hit the hardest as its search, email, Gemini, and YouTube services were among those affected — see below.

Currently, the AWS is the world leader in the cloud infrastructure market with around a third of market share, according to estimates.