VIENNA, Va.—Navy Federal Credit Union was among the institutions and companies affected by a national cloud-service outage at Amazon Web Services that resulted in lost access to online platforms like Snapchat, Reddit, Verizon, Instacart and others.
The outage originated at a Northern Virginia data center in the US-EAST-1 region. There are dozens of data centers operated by Amazon in Northern Virginia, which in recent years has become one of the largest hubs of data centers in the world.
AWS has not confirmed what caused the outage, according to multiple media reports.
What Took Place
Just after midnight on Oct. 20, Amazon began reporting issues with its Amazon Web Services, or AWS, in the eastern U.S.
Venmo, Instacart, Robinhood and Canvas appeared to be the hardest hit, according to Downdetector, although major apps and sites including Boost Mobile, Zoom, Amazon, Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox, Pinterest and FanDuel were affected, as were video-game systems like PlayStation and Xbox Live.
Among those also affected were users of the fintech Chime, with outage tracker Downdetector reporting more than 2,300 Chime users said they were experiencing problems at one point.
Downdetector did not identify any other credit unions as being affected, but that does not mean they were not.
