On October 20, 2025, Snapchat users across Pakistan and several other countries experienced widespread service disruptions following a major outage in Amazon Web Services (AWS). The issue, traced to AWS’s US-East-1 region in Northern Virginia, impacted dozens of cloud-reliant platforms globally—including Snapchat, Venmo, Fortnite, and Coinbase.

🌍 Global Impact

The outage began early Monday morning and quickly spread across multiple regions. According to Downdetector, users in the United States, United Kingdom, India, Australia, and Pakistani cities such as Karachi and Lahore reported problems ranging from login failures to non-functional messaging and media features.

🔧 Technical Breakdown

AWS attributed the disruption to a DNS resolution issue affecting DynamoDB, a core database service used by thousands of apps. This failure prevented services from locating and accessing essential data, causing widespread latency and error rates across the cloud infrastructure.

📱 Snapchat’s Status

Snapchat was among the hardest-hit platforms, with users unable to send messages, upload snaps, or access audio and video features. While some services have begun to recover, performance remains inconsistent depending on location and device.

🇵🇰 What Pakistani Users Can Do

For users in Pakistan still facing issues, experts recommend:

• Restarting the Snapchat app
• Clearing the app cache
• Temporarily switching to alternate messaging platforms

AWS has stated that it is working toward full resolution, and Snapchat’s core features are gradually returning to normal.

💡 Broader Implications

This incident has reignited concerns about the global tech ecosystem’s reliance on centralized cloud providers. As AWS powers a significant portion of the internet’s infrastructure, even a localized failure can ripple across continents, affecting millions of users and businesses.