Major Online Disruption Hits Many Websites and Apps

A widespread web outage has disrupted many online platforms and apps around the world, and users noting issues accessing the internet following issues at the online infrastructure platform.

The affected apps encompass Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, in addition to a host of Amazon-managed services such as its primary shopping website and the Ring doorbell company.

Across the United Kingdom, the financial institution Lloyds was impacted along with its branches Halifax and the Scottish bank, while there were further notifications of problems reaching the HMRC site on Monday morning. Also in the UK, many Ring device owners used social media to report their security devices were failing.

Solely in the United Kingdom, notifications of problems on specific apps totaled the many thousands for each app.

Amazon reported that the issue began in the eastern region of the US at the cloud division, a unit that supplies vital web infrastructure for numerous companies, who lease resources on AWS infrastructure. AWS is the most extensive cloud computing platform.

Soon after the start of the day (PDT) in the United States (8 in the morning BST), officials reported “increased error rates and slowdowns” for AWS services in a region on the east coast of the United States. The cascading impact appeared to hit platforms globally, with the outage tracking website reporting outages with the identical platforms in multiple continents.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a tool that reports on online failures, further indicated a rise in problems on the start of the week, including several cases located in the state of Virginia, the site of the eastern US data center where AWS said the outage began.