Major Internet Outage Hits Many Online Platforms and Apps

An extensive web failure has affected many websites and applications worldwide, with users noting problems getting online due to difficulties at Amazon’s cloud computing platform.

The impacted platforms include Snapchat, Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, in addition to several Amazon-managed operations such as its main retail site and the Ring security doorbell company.

Throughout Britain, Lloyds bank was affected along with its affiliates the bank Halifax and Bank of Scotland, while there were further notifications of problems accessing the HMRC website on that morning. Furthermore across the UK, several Ring customers turned to social media to report their doorbells were malfunctioning.

Just within Britain, accounts of disruptions on specific apps totaled the tens of thousands for every service.

Officials confirmed that the problem began in the Atlantic coast of the US at the cloud division, a division that supplies crucial internet backbone for a host of businesses, who utilize capacity on Amazon servers. Amazon Web Services is the world’s largest cloud computing service.

Just after the start of the day (PDT) in the US (8 in the morning BST), the company announced “higher failure rates and delays” for AWS services in a region on the Atlantic seaboard of the United States. The widespread consequence seemed to disrupt services globally, and the Downdetector site indicating outages with the corresponding services in multiple continents.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a tool that tracks online failures, also reported a surge in problems on Monday morning, and numerous instances found in the state of Virginia, the region of the AWS US-East-1 zone where AWS said the issues started.