Substantial Online Outage Hits Many Sites and Apps

An extensive web outage has disrupted dozens online platforms and mobile apps around the world, with users reporting issues accessing the internet following issues at Amazon’s web hosting system.

The affected services include the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and Duolingo, in addition to a host of Amazon-owned platforms like its key e-commerce website and the Ring doorbell company.

Across the United Kingdom, the financial institution Lloyds was affected in addition to its subsidiaries Halifax and Bank of Scotland, and also reports of problems accessing the HM Revenue and Customs website on that morning. Furthermore across the UK, multiple Ring customers turned to online platforms to complain their doorbells were failing.

In the UK alone, accounts of issues on individual applications reached the thousands for every service.

Officials confirmed that the problem began in the east coast of the US at Amazon Web Services, a unit that offers crucial internet framework for many companies, who utilize capacity on AWS infrastructure. AWS is the world’s largest online services system.

Just after late night (PDT) in the US (morning UK time), officials reported “increased failure rates and delays” for the cloud services in a zone on the Atlantic seaboard of the America. The widespread consequence appeared to hit platforms globally, and the problem monitoring service reporting problems with the corresponding services in various regions.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a tool that reports on web disruptions, also reported a surge in problems on the start of the week, and numerous instances situated in the Virginia area, the region of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where officials confirmed the outage began.