Major Online Outage Affects Many Sites and Apps

A widespread internet disruption has impacted dozens websites and mobile apps worldwide, as users experiencing troubles accessing the internet following issues at Amazon’s online infrastructure system.

The impacted platforms comprise Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, as well as a host of Amazon-managed services including its key e-commerce platform and the Ring home security firm.

Across the United Kingdom, the financial institution Lloyds was disrupted along with its affiliates the bank Halifax and the Scottish bank, and also reports of problems using the the tax authority online portal on the start of the week. Furthermore across the UK, several Ring device owners used networks to report their security devices were failing.

In the UK alone, notifications of issues on individual platforms ran into the thousands for each app.

Officials confirmed that the issue started in the eastern region of the America at Amazon Web Services, a unit that provides crucial internet backbone for many businesses, who lease capacity on AWS infrastructure. The cloud platform is the most extensive cloud computing platform.

Just after midnight (PDT) in the United States (morning UK time), the company announced “higher problem frequencies and delays” for AWS services in a area on the Atlantic seaboard of the US. The cascading impact seemed to hit services around the world, and the problem monitoring service reporting outages with the identical platforms in various regions.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a service that monitors web disruptions, also reported a surge in issues on that morning, and numerous instances found in the state of Virginia, the location of the AWS US-East-1 zone where officials confirmed the issues originated.