Is Snapchat down? Thousands report issues amid AWS outage

Social media app Snapchat was among the many platforms impacted by a major Amazon Web Services outage on Oct. 20.

According to Downdetector, more than 21,000 users reported problems with Snapchat at around 4 a.m. ET at the peak of the app outage. As of 2 p.m. ET, around 7,200 users continued to report issues with the app.

The issues with the app were in connection with the large AWS outage that began at around 3 a.m. ET, which was rooted in its US-EAST-1 Region, which is based in Northern Virginia, according to AWS.

"We have narrowed down the source of the network connectivity issues that impacted AWS Services. The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers," AWS said in the latest update on its status page.

AWS said the issue originated from the "EC2 internal network." EC2 refers to Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud" service, which provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS, Reuters reported. EC2 is used by companies to run virtual servers to develop, launch and host applications.

Snapchat did not immediately respond to USA TODAY's request for comment.

USA TODAY’s Melina Khan and Reuters contributed to this report.

Fernando Cervantes Jr. is a trending news reporter for USA TODAY. Reach him at [email protected] and follow him on X @fern_cerv_.