Social media app Snapchat faced widespread problems on Oct. 20 as part of a major Amazon Web Services outage. According to USA TODAY, more than 21,000 users reported Snapchat issues at the peak around 4 a.m. ET. By 2 p.m. ET, around 7,200 users still had problems with the app.
AWS Outage Impacts Multiple Services
The outage began at around 3 a.m. ET. Amazon Web Services said the problem was in its US-EAST-1 Region, which is based in Northern Virginia. The company narrowed down the source of network connectivity problems affecting its services.
AWS said the root cause was an internal subsystem. This system is responsible for monitoring the health of network load balancers. The issue started in the EC2 internal network, according to AWS.
What Is EC2 and How Does It Work
EC2 refers to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud service. It provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS, Reuters reported. Companies use EC2 to run virtual servers. These servers help them develop, launch and host applications.
User Reports and App Status
Downdetector tracked the problems users faced with Snapchat. The tracking site showed user reports started rising early in the morning. The number of reports dropped later in the day but remained in the thousands.
Snapchat did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The app was among many platforms impacted by the AWS outage. Other websites and apps also experienced problems during the same time period.
AWS posted updates on its status page. The company worked to fix the network connectivity issues. It identified the internal subsystem as the main problem affecting services.
The outage affected services that rely on AWS infrastructure. Many companies use AWS to host their applications and store data. When AWS faces problems, these services can stop working properly for users.
