Major Web Outage Impacts Numerous Sites and Apps

A large-scale online disruption has affected many sites and applications globally, and users reporting problems accessing the internet due to difficulties at Amazon’s cloud computing platform.

The impacted services comprise Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, and Duolingo, as well as several Amazon-owned services including its main retail platform and the Ring security doorbell company.

Across the United Kingdom, Lloyds bank was disrupted in addition to its branches the bank Halifax and the Scottish bank, and additional accounts of problems reaching the HMRC online portal on the start of the week. Additionally in Britain, many Ring device owners turned to social media to complain their doorbells were malfunctioning.

Just within Britain, accounts of disruptions on specific applications totaled the thousands for each platform.

The company stated that the issue began in the east coast of the US at AWS, a section that offers crucial web infrastructure for many companies, who utilize resources on Amazon servers. AWS is the world’s largest online services service.

Soon after midnight (PDT) in the US (8 in the morning BST), officials reported “higher failure rates and slowdowns” for Amazon's platforms in a zone on the eastern US of the United States. The ripple effect appeared to disrupt services around the world, and the outage tracking website indicating issues with the identical platforms in different parts of the world.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a tool that monitors web disruptions, additionally noted a increase in problems on the start of the week, with many of them located in the state of Virginia, the site of the eastern US data center where AWS said the problems originated.