PANews reported on October 20th that, according to Down Detector monitoring, popular apps and websites, including Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo, and Canva, began experiencing issues around 4:00 PM Beijing Time on October 20th. The outage was attributed to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which experienced issues at its Northern Virginia facilities, leading to increased errors and latency in services such as Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. The outage affected a wide range of platforms, including Coinbase, Prime Video, and PlayStation.

AWS is one of the world's largest cloud service providers, with revenue of $108 billion last year, accounting for the majority of Amazon's profits.