Significant Online Outage Impacts Many Sites and Mobile Apps

A large-scale internet failure has impacted numerous sites and applications globally, with users experiencing issues accessing the internet due to difficulties at the cloud computing platform.

The affected apps encompass Snapchat, Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, as well as several Amazon-managed operations like its primary shopping website and the Ring doorbell home security firm.

In the UK, Lloyds bank was disrupted along with its affiliates the bank Halifax and the Scottish bank, and also reports of problems accessing the HM Revenue and Customs site on Monday morning. Additionally in Britain, several Ring customers turned to online platforms to complain their home gadgets were malfunctioning.

In the UK alone, accounts of problems on specific apps ran into the many thousands for each app.

The company stated that the issue started in the east coast of the US at the cloud division, a unit that supplies vital online infrastructure for a host of companies, who rent out resources on Amazon servers. AWS is the most extensive web hosting service.

Just after midnight (PDT) in the United States (8am BST), officials reported “increased error rates and slowdowns” for the cloud services in a region on the eastern US of the America. The widespread consequence seemed to hit services worldwide, and the outage tracking website reporting outages with the corresponding services in multiple continents.

The outage tracker Thousand Eyes, a tool that tracks online failures, additionally noted a rise in outages on the start of the week, and numerous instances located in the state of Virginia, the site of the AWS US-East-1 zone where AWS said the issues originated.