Major Online Outage Affects Dozens Sites and Applications

A widespread online failure has affected many websites and apps worldwide, and users experiencing problems getting online after problems at Amazon’s web hosting service.

The impacted services comprise Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, along with several Amazon-operated operations including its key e-commerce site and the Ring device manufacturer.

In the UK, the financial institution Lloyds was affected in addition to its subsidiaries Halifax and the Scottish bank, with additional accounts of problems using the HMRC online portal on the start of the week. Also in the UK, multiple Ring customers took to networks to report their security devices were malfunctioning.

Just within Britain, notifications of issues on specific platforms reached the tens of thousands for each app.

Amazon reported that the problem started in the eastern region of the US at the cloud division, a division that supplies essential web backbone for numerous firms, who rent out space on the company's servers. Amazon Web Services is the world’s largest online services service.

Soon after late night (PDT) in the US (morning UK time), the company announced “increased failure rates and delays” for the cloud services in a area on the Atlantic seaboard of the US. The ripple effect appeared to affect services around the world, and the outage tracking website reporting outages with the corresponding services in multiple continents.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a tool that tracks web disruptions, also reported a surge in problems on that morning, and numerous instances located in Virginia, the region of the AWS US-East-1 zone where officials confirmed the problems began.