Substantial Online Disruption Impacts Numerous Online Platforms and Mobile Apps

An extensive web failure has affected numerous online platforms and apps around the world, as users reporting troubles connecting to the web after problems at Amazon’s web hosting platform.

The impacted platforms comprise the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, in addition to multiple Amazon-operated services including its key e-commerce site and the Ring doorbell home security firm.

In the UK, Lloyds bank was affected in addition to its subsidiaries Halifax and Bank of Scotland, with also reports of difficulties using the HM Revenue and Customs online portal on the start of the week. Also in the UK, many Ring customers used online platforms to complain their home gadgets were not working.

Just within Britain, accounts of disruptions on individual applications reached the many thousands for every service.

Officials confirmed that the issue began in the Atlantic coast of the US at the cloud division, a division that supplies crucial web infrastructure for numerous companies, who utilize space on Amazon servers. Amazon Web Services is the world’s largest cloud computing system.

Soon after the start of the day (PDT) in the America (8am BST), Amazon confirmed “elevated error rates and latencies” for Amazon's platforms in a area on the Atlantic seaboard of the US. The cascading impact seemed to affect services globally, with the outage tracking website showing problems with the corresponding services in various regions.

The outage tracker Thousand Eyes, a service that reports on internet outages, further indicated a increase in outages on Monday morning, with many of them found in the Virginia area, the region of the AWS US-East-1 zone where the company stated the problems began.