Amazon Web Services (AWS), upon which many, many internet-based services around the world rely, is currently experiencing a major outage that has rendered numerous websites, games, and banks — including Fortnite, Roblox, Canva, Snapchat, and many others — temporarily unusable. It’s unclear when the issue will be fixed.
AWS is working on it, promise
⚠️ An outage affecting several services on the internet is also impacting Fortnite log-ins. We’re investigating this now, and will update you when we have more details.
— Fortnite Status (@FortniteStatus) October 20, 2025
“We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region,” Amazon’s AWS status checkers reads. This outage isn’t limited to the US, unfortunately, with many South Africans experiencing similar issues across the internet beginning Monday morning. Stuff has faced issues with Canva and others as of this morning, though at the time of writing, some functionality appears to be restored.
A quick visit to South Africa’s downdetector.co.za shows off the biggest services experiencing troubles. Many began experiencing issues with the affected parties at around 09h00 SAST this morning, with several updates from AWS’ health status since. The latest brings good news for what has a been a disrupted morning for most.
“We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests. We will continue to provide additional information,” Amazon said at 11h27 SAST.
It’s no surprise that Amazon’s own services were disrupted too, with users on Reddit (another site that took a hit, apparently) reporting that the company’s Alexa smart assistant wasn’t responding correctly to requests. The Verge noted that “routines like pre-set alarms are not functioning.” Try explaining that one to your boss.
UPDATE (12h03 SAST): In the process of covering the outage, we noticed AWS’ status checker had returned with some good news: “We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS Services. We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered. We continue to work towards full resolution and will provide updates as we have more information to share.”
