Significant Online Failure Impacts Many Sites and Mobile Apps

A widespread internet outage has disrupted numerous websites and applications worldwide, with users reporting issues accessing the internet after problems at Amazon’s online infrastructure system.

The impacted apps include the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, as well as a host of Amazon-owned platforms such as its key e-commerce website and the Ring security device manufacturer.

In the UK, the financial institution Lloyds was affected in addition to its subsidiaries Halifax and the Scottish bank, and also reports of problems using the HM Revenue and Customs online portal on the start of the week. Additionally in Britain, multiple Ring users took to social media to state their doorbells were malfunctioning.

Just within Britain, notifications of disruptions on particular apps ran into the thousands for each app.

Amazon reported that the outage started in the eastern region of the US at the cloud division, a division that supplies crucial web infrastructure for a host of companies, who lease resources on Amazon servers. AWS is the most extensive web hosting platform.

Soon after the start of the day (PDT) in the United States (8 in the morning BST), the company announced “higher problem frequencies and latencies” for Amazon's platforms in a area on the Atlantic seaboard of the America. The ripple effect seemed to disrupt platforms worldwide, with the Downdetector site indicating issues with the identical platforms in various regions.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a tool that monitors web disruptions, also reported a increase in issues on the start of the week, with many of them found in the state of Virginia, the region of the eastern US data center where AWS said the problems started.