Canadians awoke to find several of their favourite services experiencing technical difficulties after Amazon reported a major outage in its cloud computing service.
Wealthsimple and Coinbase confirmed to The Canadian Press that they were among the many companies affected when Amazon Web Services reported troubles in the middle of the night.
AWS is a cloud computing platform companies use to operate websites, programs and other services, so they don’t have to pay for their own servers and physical infrastructure.
The AWS outage impacted Amazon’s US-EAST-1 Region, which is based in northern Virginia.
While AWS continues to report issues, Wealthsimple and Coinbase say their services have largely recovered from the outage.
DownDetector, a popular website for tracking outages, also saw an increase in users reporting issues with Fortnite, Snapchat, Pinterest and Instacart around the same time as the AWS outage.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 20, 2025.
