Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant service disruption on October 20, 2025, causing widespread outages across multiple platforms, with Snapchat being among the most notably affected applications.
The cloud infrastructure failure impacted users internationally, including those in Pakistan, where the social media platform has maintained a substantial user base since gaining popularity around 2014. At the incident’s peak, outage monitoring platforms recorded over 22,000 user reports specifically for Snapchat, highlighting the severity of the disruption.
Technical experts identified AWS as the root cause of the service interruptions. In Pakistan, approximately 53 percent of affected users reported experiencing either limited functionality or complete inability to access the application during the outage period.
AWS engineering teams responded swiftly to the crisis, deploying resources to diagnose and resolve the underlying infrastructure issues. According to preliminary assessments, the technical teams are actively implementing mitigation strategies, with full service restoration anticipated within a 24-hour timeframe for users in Pakistan and other affected regions.
This incident underscores the critical dependency of modern digital services on cloud infrastructure providers. When major platforms like AWS experience technical difficulties, the ripple effects extend across countless applications and services that rely on their infrastructure for operation.
The outage comes at a challenging time for Snapchat in Pakistan, where users have recently expressed frustration over the platform’s introduction of paid storage requirements. This new monetization strategy had already generated significant discussion among the app’s dedicated user community before the technical disruption occurred.
As cloud computing continues to dominate the digital landscape, this incident serves as a reminder of the importance of robust infrastructure management and the potential widespread impact when critical services experience downtime.
