Substantial Web Outage Hits Many Sites and Applications

A large-scale internet outage has disrupted many sites and mobile apps around the world, with users reporting troubles accessing the internet following issues at Amazon’s online infrastructure platform.

The affected apps encompass the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, in addition to multiple Amazon-owned platforms including its primary shopping platform and the Ring security doorbell company.

Across the United Kingdom, the financial institution Lloyds was affected along with its branches Halifax and Bank of Scotland, and further notifications of difficulties accessing the HMRC site on the start of the week. Furthermore across the UK, many Ring device owners took to social media to state their home gadgets were failing.

Solely in the United Kingdom, notifications of problems on specific applications ran into the thousands for each platform.

Amazon reported that the problem started in the east coast of the America at AWS, a division that offers crucial internet framework for many businesses, who utilize resources on Amazon servers. AWS is the biggest global web hosting system.

Just after the start of the day (PDT) in the US (8 in the morning BST), officials reported “increased failure rates and slowdowns” for AWS services in a area on the Atlantic seaboard of the US. The cascading impact was seen to affect services around the world, and the Downdetector site reporting issues with the same sites in multiple continents.

The outage tracker Thousand Eyes, a service that tracks internet outages, further indicated a surge in problems on the start of the week, including several cases situated in the state of Virginia, the site of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where the company stated the issues started.