Major Web Outage Affects Many Online Platforms and Apps

An extensive internet outage has affected many sites and applications around the world, with users experiencing issues getting online following issues at Amazon’s online infrastructure system.

The impacted apps encompass the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, in addition to several Amazon-operated services like its key e-commerce platform and the Ring device manufacturer.

Across the United Kingdom, the financial institution Lloyds was affected in addition to its branches the bank Halifax and Bank of Scotland, while there were further notifications of difficulties using the the tax authority website on that morning. Additionally in Britain, multiple Ring customers took to social media to complain their security devices were failing.

In the UK alone, accounts of problems on individual platforms totaled the thousands for each platform.

Amazon reported that the outage originated in the east coast of the US at the cloud division, a division that offers crucial online backbone for numerous businesses, who lease resources on the company's servers. AWS is the world’s largest web hosting system.

Shortly after midnight (PDT) in the America (morning UK time), Amazon confirmed “elevated error rates and latencies” for AWS services in a zone on the eastern US of the United States. The cascading impact was seen to disrupt platforms around the world, and the outage tracking website indicating outages with the identical platforms in different parts of the world.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a platform that monitors web disruptions, also reported a rise in outages on that morning, including several cases found in Virginia, the site of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where officials confirmed the problems started.