A large-scale outage of an Amazon AWS in the US-EAST-1 region on October 20, 2025, impacted several platforms, including Snapchat, which was down several hours, and caused many users around the globe to become confused. The outage resulted in the failure to log in, broken streaks, and delayed messages, which soon spread virally as a hoax that Snapchat was suspending accounts.
The AWS failure started at about 3:00 AM ET due to a DNS failure that hit major sites such as Reddit, Venmo, Fortnite, Zoom, and Snapchat. At least 6.5 million disruption reports had been logged at Downdetector, and users could not send snaps or view stories. Amazon subsequently verified that it was an internal system problem, not a cyberattack and the recovery was done in phases starting in the afternoon.
The counterfeit chain messages rapidly disseminated on Snapchat and X during the downtime alerting users that their account would get deleted unless they sent a message to 10 or 20 people. Such Snapchat suspending accounts hoaxes were successful in such places as Pakistan, Nigeria, and France, where one was unable to confirm official news. Snapchat later refuted the allegations, saying that there were no account suspensions.
Snapchat Support stated the issue was “purely technical” due to the Amazon AWS outage, not policy enforcement or bot purges. Users were advised to ignore fake messages, avoid mass forwarding, and secure accounts using two-factor authentication.
No real Snapchat suspending accounts policy was in place. The panic was driven by misinformation during the Snapchat down period caused by the Amazon AWS outage. Services were fully restored later that day.
