The reason "everything is down right now" primarily stems from a massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage. AWS, a crucial cloud infrastructure provider, experienced a significant disruption in its North Virginia data center region on October 20, 2025, affecting many popular websites and apps including Snapchat, Venmo, Roblox, United Airlines, Ring, Coinbase, and more. This outage led to widespread service disruptions, increased error rates, and slow data delivery, impacting multiple industries such as social media, gaming, finance, and travel globally.

Besides this technical outage, the broader context shows an economic environment marked by high debt levels, geopolitical tensions, persistent inflation, and trade protectionism, which create uncertainty and slow economic growth worldwide in 2025. These factors contribute to an overall fragile state for digital and financial services.

In summary, the immediate reason for many online services being down is the AWS technical outage, while global economic challenges contribute to general instability.