Hilarious memes erupt online as Amazon’s AWS outage hits meme-maker favourite Canva

If anything good came out of the massive outage that hit Amazon Web Services (AWS), it may be that, for a few precious hours, the internet was spared from thousands of memes, ugly picture cards, and soulless sales pitches.

The outage knocked out the wildly popular design tool Canva from around 3pm to 6pm on Oct 20 and again from past midnight till 3am on Oct 21, according to internet traffic monitoring site Downdetector.

About 75 per cent of users reported “issues” with the site and the app, while the rest said they had server connection problems.

Panic gripped caffeine-fuelled social media managers, meme lords, and self-proclaimed “visual storytellers”.

In a touch of irony, Canva – a favourite tool among meme makers – became the target of hilarious memes itself.

X erupted with funny posts mocking those who rely on Canva to get their design needs done with as little creativity or thought as possible.

There were GIFs and images of offices descending into chaos, and on fire.

One popular X post – which has been seen more than 90,000 times – has a Seth Rogen lookalike holding a burning loaf of bread as one worker rides a rampaging ostrich, another hyperventilates into a paper bag, and the rest run around like headless chickens.

A twin-photo post – viewed more than 100,000 times – has a man looking on with deadpan calm as fire engulfs a pan he has on a stove and a woman maniacally spraying what looks like butane gas on a flame from a lighter.

Another has a female worker gleefully tossing a match onto a floor she has doused with petrol to burn down a massive server room.

‘Canva’ look

Canva – a US$40 billion (S$52 billion) company with more than 60 million monthly active users in 190 countries – has allowed non-creative types to churn out designs for their information and promotion materials.

While it has been praised for its ease of use, designers, marketers and even casual users have taken issue with it for its templates-based interface.

They argue that it devalues real graphic design, pointing to what they deride as the “Canva look” – a shorthand for “basic but passable”.

The cloud-based app was among the many websites and apps that went offline on Oct 20 when an outage hit AWS, the cloud service provider that supports much of the internet.

The outage also affected WhatsApp, the British government’s website and tax services, the payment app Venmo, the cryptocurrency platform Coinbase, games at The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal’s website.

Dozens of other companies and retailers – including Amazon, Hulu, Snapchat, McDonald’s, Ring doorbells and the game Fortnite – also experienced interruptions.

Downdetector said there were more than 11 million reports related to AWS, many from the United States and Britain.

Experts said the incident once again highlighted how heavily the internet depends on a few major technology providers – including Amazon, Microsoft and Google — meaning that a single failure can disrupt millions of users.

In 2024, a similar but wider, day-long outage was triggered by a faulty software update from the cyber security company CrowdStrike.