Amazon Web Services outage hits dozens of platforms, including Canva, Snapchat
The effects of a major Amazon outage lingered for 15 hours, and now cyber security experts warn scammers could have already swooped in.
Major disruptions to the network backing popular apps and websites Snapchat, Reddit, Fortnite, Duolingo and Xero have largely been fixed after a day of large-scale disruption.
In an update from Amazon Web Services shortly before midday AEDT on Tuesday, 15 hours after the outages hit, the company says the remaining fixes and clean ups have been sorted.
The issues, stemming from a data centre in Virginia, struck just before 12am Monday local time.
But there are fears of potentially wider fallout with security software firm McAfee warning scammers quickly try and cash in on such major disruptions.
In an update posted about noon on Tuesday (AEDT), the Amazon subsidiary spelled out a jargon-heavy but detailed description of what tech was experiencing the errors, and what was being done to trace the problem.
The outage is being dubbed the biggest internet disruption of 2025.
“Events like this sow uncertainty for consumers. When apps fail to load, people may wonder: Is my account hacked? Is my data at risk? Is it just me? Cybercriminals exploit that confusion,” McAfee head of Asia Pacific Tyler McGee said.
“After past outages, McAfee researchers have seen phishing campaigns, fake refund emails, and malicious links promising ‘fixes’ or ‘status updates’ appear within hours.
“Scammers often mimic legitimate service alerts, complete with logos and urgent wording, to trick users into entering passwords or payment information. Others push fake customer-support numbers or send direct messages claiming to restore access,” Mr McGee said.
AWS is the cloud computing arm of Amazon and provides computing power, data storage and digital services to companies, governments and individuals. The subsidiary is the world’s largest cloud provider, ahead of Microsoft’s Azure and Alphabet’s Google Cloud.
This week’s outage stemmed from a data centre in northern Virginia in the US – the company’s oldest and largest web services centre – that was also hit by outages in 2020 and 2021.
It is one of the largest since CrowdStrike malfunctioned last year when airports, banks and hospitals were ripped offline.
Australians began seeing the effects about 8pm (AEDT) on Monday.
In an earlier update, AWS advised “significant error rates” for requests were made to its data storage service DynamoDB in the “US-EAST-1 Region”.
“During this time, customers may be unable to create or update support cases,” the update stated.
“Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause.”
Cyber Insider reported the region was one of AWS’s most critical and most used data centre hubs that powered large amounts of traffic and infrastructure in the US.
“Disruptions here often cascade into widespread service degradation for both consumer-facing and enterprise applications,” Cyber Insider reported.
Telstra advised their services were not impacted by the outage.
Optus said its fixed and mobile services were not affected, but data services that relied on AWS infrastructure were interrupted during the outage.
Business software giant Xero was hit, with the outage locking out customers.
“We’re aware of an issue preventing some customers from logging into Xero,” the company said in a status update during the breakdown.
“This is related to an issue with our third party provider, Amazon Web Services, who are investigating this with urgency.”
Some of its customers began logging back into its platform just after 8pm.
AWS provides series to online applications, an online storage service known as Amazon S3 and a remote compute or cloud computing platform called EC2.
Amazon’s own platforms were affected by the outage including Prime Video and Alexa, as well as multiple banks and government services in the UK.
The Bank of Scotland, Halifax and Lloyds were all offline during the outage.
Other online financial services reported issues with their platform including cryptocurrency provider Coinbase.
“Our team is working on the issue and we’ll provide updates here. All funds are safe,” Coinbase advised users on X.
AI company Perplexity reported it was working to restore its services that were “down right now” due to an “AWS issue.”
Meanwhile, the popular language-learning website and app Duolingo was caught up in the outage.
The website read it is down for a “quick maintenance break!”
Originally published as Amazon Web Services outage hits dozens of platforms, including Canva, Snapchat
