AWS outage hits Indian users as global cloud disruption knocks apps offline

A massive outage in AWS (Amazon Web Services) disrupted several leading websites and apps across India on Monday, 20 October, as part of a global cloud failure that crippled large portions of the internet.

Thousands of Indian users reported being unable to access key digital services such as Canva, Roblox, Snapchat, and Duolingo from around 12.30 pm, coinciding with outages reported in the United States and Europe.

CMSs (content management systems) such as WordPress and Quintype are also affected, which has impeded the publication of news on major news websites and blogs.

According to outage tracker Downdetector, around 15,000 user reports emerged across the world within the first hour of the disruption, including over 1,000 from India. The issue was traced to AWS’s US-East-1 region in northern Virginia, a core hub that routes much of the world’s cloud traffic.

The outage, which began around noon, triggered widespread service errors and high latency rates across Amazon’s core systems — including DynamoDB, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and the Support API.

Several Indian startups and digital service providers dependent on AWS’s infrastructure reported partial or full service downtime. Platforms such as Perplexity AI, Canva, Robinhood, and Coinbase confirmed that their Indian services were affected by the outage.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas wrote on X: “Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.”

Among Indian users, educational and design applications such as Duolingo and Canva were among the worst affected. Canva users in metro cities including Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru reported being unable to edit or export design projects.

Gamers also faced problems with Roblox, Fortnite, and Clash Royale, which rely on AWS cloud servers for real-time connectivity.

On the social and entertainment front, Snapchat’s messaging and stories features crashed intermittently, while Amazon Music and Prime Video also experienced buffering issues for Indian users. Vodafone India’s online portals reportedly faced slow-loading pages due to dependencies on AWS-hosted services.

Amazon’s cloud status page confirmed 'increased error rates and latencies' in the US-East-1 region, which indirectly affected global connections. The company said engineers were 'actively working to mitigate the problem' and had begun deploying recovery protocols. By evening, partial restoration had been achieved across several regions, though some users continued to experience delays.

In India, the outage drew attention to the country’s growing dependence on foreign cloud infrastructure. Digital commerce firms, streaming platforms, and fintech services hosted on AWS collectively serve millions of users daily. Industry experts warned that the event highlights the risks of over-reliance on a few international service providers.

“When a core AWS region experiences disruption, the ripple effects are felt instantly by Indian enterprises and consumers alike,” said telecom analyst Rajiv Khanna.

Although services slowly stabilised by late evening, AWS had yet to provide a detailed explanation for the disruption or an estimated timeline for complete resolution. Amazon described the issue as one of its “most significant global service disruptions in recent times.”

For India’s expanding tech ecosystem, where cloud services underpin everything from online education to app-based mobility and digital banking, Monday’s incident served as a reminder of how vulnerable even the most reliable systems can be when a single provider’s network falters.

With agency inputs