Significant Online Disruption Impacts Many Online Platforms and Apps

An extensive internet disruption has impacted dozens websites and mobile apps worldwide, with users reporting issues getting online after problems at Amazon’s cloud computing system.

The affected platforms encompass the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, along with a host of Amazon-owned services including its main retail site and the Ring security device manufacturer.

Across the United Kingdom, Lloyds bank was affected in addition to its branches the bank Halifax and Bank of Scotland, and further notifications of difficulties accessing the HMRC site on Monday morning. Also in the UK, multiple Ring users took to social media to complain their doorbells were failing.

In the UK alone, reports of disruptions on specific applications ran into the many thousands for each app.

Officials confirmed that the problem originated in the eastern region of the US at AWS, a unit that provides crucial web infrastructure for numerous businesses, who rent out space on Amazon servers. Amazon Web Services is the most extensive cloud computing platform.

Soon after the start of the day (PDT) in the US (morning UK time), Amazon confirmed “increased failure rates and slowdowns” for Amazon's platforms in a area on the Atlantic seaboard of the America. The widespread consequence was seen to hit platforms globally, and the Downdetector site indicating outages with the corresponding services in different parts of the world.

The outage tracker Thousand Eyes, a platform that tracks online failures, further indicated a surge in outages on the start of the week, and numerous instances found in the state of Virginia, the region of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where officials confirmed the problems started.