Canva Faces Global Disruption: Key Design Features Hit

Thousands of graphic designers in India and other parts of the world could not view, edit and save their in-progress work projects on the famous graphic design tool Canva on Tuesday, July 8, 2025 as a technical problem interrupted services and left the struggling users unattended. Although basic services like uploading and downloading media content have been stable, some key functionalities have been found to be broken most of the day prompting frustration levels among users and calling into question the dependability of a platform.

The interruption was detected at approximately 12:13 PM AEST and expanded across several areas, with the users unable to carry out basic editing functions, as well as no access to collaborative tools. Canva, which has since become a fundamental component of content creators as well as business owners, educationalists and marketers, recognized the problem soon after it had commenced but have not provided an agenda of total restoration.

Widespread Impact on Collaboration Tools

The outage in Canva did concern mostly its collaborative and real-time editors. Users noted that their features including live commenting, CanvaAI-based assistant, notifications, and the user-following tool became non-functional as defined in the entity-monitoring system of the company.

It required the users to keep refreshing the platform to make an update on comments or receive the new design versions. There were also numerous complaints that CanvaAI cannot respond to the call of design or suggest how to operate the tool.

The following are the more important services which were impacted by the outage:

• Design editing and saving: Changes made to designs were not being saved or displayed correctly.
• CanvaAI: The built-in AI assistant failed to respond to feature queries or provide design help.
• Real-time collaboration: Comments and notifications required manual page refresh to appear.
• Live tracking tools: Features like “timer” and “follow user” stopped working entirely.

Nevertheless, all these shortcomings did not affect other features like the access to templates, the possibility of publishing websites, mobile and desktop-based apps, and downloading designs that seemed to be working well.

As soon as reports emerged, the engineering team of Canva started to inspect the issue. First detection was recorded at 11:35 AM AEST at which the first fix was made at 11:53 AM. Even though it was observed that some improvement came, it would still take hours to fix the problem; by 2:10 PM AEST, the company had officially declared the situation as an unresolved incident.

The problem was eventually resolved at 3.31 PM AEST. Nevertheless, a delay in full recovery caused even the hours of idleness among many users with quick deadlines to meet through Canva.

An overview of the history of services provided by Canva points out that it is the second problem registered in July. On July 3, a latency-related disruption was reported, which was much smaller with regard to scale and influence. There were no recorded outages on July 4-7, which shows that the July 8 event can be considered a huge break in services this month.

Frustration Mounts Among Creative Professionals

Although temporary, the outage has triggered the concerns of the professional user base of Canva. During the disruption, freelancers, design agencies and corporate teams were angered by delays in delivering projects as well as having limited availability of communication tools. Complaints about the incident and memes were flushed to social media, in particular, X (formerly Twitter).

I was under the clock in the morning, did not have time to download or complete my design till late in the afternoon. It is really an inconvenience to our work, said a freelance brand designer in Mumbai.

People have been demanding Canva to communicate more and faster to implement speedier recovery plans in case of such.

At this point, Canva did not reveal the exact technical reason for the disruption. Although the platform status page also recorded the occurrence of the problem and actions that were performed to restore it, no concise opinion has been presented regarding the source of the problem or the measures in place to avoid the same in the future.

The company has referred users who are still experiencing some problems to contact it through the Canva Help Center. Whether a postmortem report, or any further explanation will be published in the next few days remains to be known.