Major Online Outage Hits Numerous Sites and Applications

A widespread online failure has impacted numerous online platforms and applications worldwide, and users experiencing issues accessing the internet after problems at the online infrastructure service.

The affected platforms comprise the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, along with a host of Amazon-owned operations like its main retail website and the Ring doorbell doorbell company.

Throughout Britain, the financial institution Lloyds was affected as well as its subsidiaries the bank Halifax and the Scottish bank, while there were additional accounts of difficulties reaching the HMRC website on the start of the week. Additionally in Britain, multiple Ring users used networks to report their security devices were malfunctioning.

In the UK alone, notifications of disruptions on specific apps ran into the tens of thousands for each platform.

Officials confirmed that the problem started in the Atlantic coast of the US at the cloud division, a unit that supplies vital online backbone for many businesses, who lease capacity on AWS infrastructure. Amazon Web Services is the most extensive cloud computing service.

Soon after the start of the day (PDT) in the United States (8am BST), officials reported “increased problem frequencies and delays” for the cloud services in a area on the eastern US of the US. The widespread consequence appeared to disrupt apps around the world, with the problem monitoring service showing outages with the same sites in multiple continents.

The outage tracker Thousand Eyes, a tool that reports on web disruptions, additionally noted a rise in problems on the start of the week, including several cases found in Virginia, the site of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where AWS said the outage began.