Major Online Outage Hits Numerous Sites and Mobile Apps

A large-scale online outage has affected numerous websites and apps around the world, with users experiencing problems accessing the internet due to difficulties at Amazon’s cloud computing service.

The disrupted platforms comprise the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and Duolingo, in addition to multiple Amazon-owned operations like its primary shopping site and the Ring device manufacturer.

Across the United Kingdom, the financial institution Lloyds was disrupted in addition to its subsidiaries Halifax and the Scottish bank, and also reports of difficulties using the HMRC website on Monday morning. Also in the UK, multiple Ring device owners turned to online platforms to complain their doorbells were malfunctioning.

Just within Britain, reports of issues on individual applications reached the many thousands for each platform.

Officials confirmed that the outage started in the east coast of the United States at the cloud division, a division that provides essential web framework for many businesses, who rent out capacity on AWS infrastructure. The cloud platform is the biggest global web hosting platform.

Shortly after midnight (PDT) in the America (morning UK time), Amazon confirmed “increased failure rates and latencies” for Amazon's platforms in a zone on the Atlantic seaboard of the United States. The widespread consequence was seen to hit services around the world, and the outage tracking website reporting problems with the identical platforms in multiple continents.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a platform that tracks online failures, also reported a rise in problems on the start of the week, with many of them found in Virginia, the region of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where the company stated the issues started.