Numerous users have taken to Down Detector, a platform that tracks service outages, to report troubles accessing several popular online services such as Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Canva, and Duolingo.

The source of these disruptions seems to be Amazon Web Services (AWS), which underpins the infrastructure for many significant websites and applications.

Amazon has acknowledged the situation and assured that their engineers are actively working to resolve the issues.

Down Detector is currently displaying an extensive list of sites and apps experiencing user-reported errors.

While some services have confirmed their connectivity issues are directly tied to AWS, others, as indicated by Down Detector, are likely experiencing related outages.

Websites experiencing difficulties include:

What has Amazon Web Services said?

Just after 8pm AEDT, Amazon Web Services said its engineers had “identified a potential root cause” of the outage and services were being restored.

“We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS Services,” the company said in a statement.

“We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered.

“We continue to work towards full resolution and will provide updates as we have more information to share.”

Is Snapchat down right now?

One of the biggest websites affected by the outage has been Snapchat, a social media platform with about 900 million active monthly users.

Users reported difficulty logging into Snapchat after being met with error messages.

The company told users on X its team was looking into the issue.

What is Amazon Web Services?

Amazon Web Services provides cloud computing.

AWS is a subsidiary of Amazon, the mega company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest people.

“Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centres and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis,” AWS says.

It says its customers are companies “of every type, size and industry”.

It provides infrastructure that is used for data backup, disaster recovery, email, virtual desktops, software development and testing, big data analytics, and customer-facing web applications.