Major Internet Outage Impacts Numerous Sites and Apps

An extensive online outage has impacted many sites and applications worldwide, with users reporting troubles connecting to the web due to difficulties at Amazon’s cloud computing service.

The affected platforms comprise Snapchat, Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and Duolingo, as well as a host of Amazon-managed platforms like its main retail platform and the Ring security device manufacturer.

Across the United Kingdom, Lloyds bank was affected in addition to its subsidiaries the bank Halifax and Bank of Scotland, while there were also reports of difficulties accessing the HM Revenue and Customs website on Monday morning. Furthermore across the UK, multiple Ring device owners turned to online platforms to state their doorbells were failing.

Just within Britain, notifications of issues on particular platforms ran into the thousands for each app.

Amazon reported that the problem originated in the eastern region of the US at AWS, a unit that supplies crucial web backbone for many businesses, who rent out space on AWS infrastructure. AWS is the world’s largest web hosting platform.

Just after the start of the day (PDT) in the America (morning UK time), Amazon confirmed “higher error rates and slowdowns” for AWS services in a area on the east coast of the United States. The cascading impact seemed to disrupt apps globally, with the Downdetector site indicating issues with the identical platforms in multiple continents.

The outage tracker Thousand Eyes, a tool that reports on web disruptions, also reported a rise in problems on the start of the week, with many of them found in the Virginia area, the region of the eastern US data center where the company stated the problems began.