Major Web Disruption Affects Dozens Websites and Mobile Apps

A widespread online outage has impacted many sites and apps globally, as users experiencing troubles getting online after problems at Amazon’s online infrastructure platform.

The impacted services include the social media app Snapchat, Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, along with several Amazon-operated platforms including its main retail platform and the Ring doorbell company.

Across the United Kingdom, Lloyds bank was impacted as well as its subsidiaries Halifax and the Scottish bank, while there were additional accounts of problems accessing the the tax authority website on Monday morning. Furthermore across the UK, several Ring customers took to social media to report their doorbells were failing.

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

Amazon reported that the problem originated in the east coast of the United States at the cloud division, a unit that supplies vital web infrastructure for a host of businesses, who lease resources on Amazon servers. The cloud platform is the world’s largest online services system.

Soon after midnight (PDT) in the US (8am BST), the company announced “higher error rates and slowdowns” for AWS services in a region on the eastern US of the US. The ripple effect was seen to affect services around the world, with the problem monitoring service showing outages with the identical platforms in multiple continents.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a platform that tracks internet outages, further indicated a increase in issues on Monday morning, with many of them located in the state of Virginia, the site of the AWS US-East-1 zone where officials confirmed the outage originated.