Significant Web Failure Hits Many Websites and Apps

A large-scale web disruption has affected dozens sites and applications globally, with users experiencing issues accessing the internet after problems at Amazon’s online infrastructure platform.

The impacted apps comprise the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and Duolingo, as well as multiple Amazon-owned operations such as its main retail website and the Ring security home security firm.

Across the United Kingdom, Lloyds bank was disrupted in addition to its branches Halifax and Bank of Scotland, while there were further notifications of problems accessing the HMRC website on the start of the week. Furthermore across the UK, many Ring users used networks to report their security devices were not working.

Solely in the United Kingdom, reports of problems on individual apps ran into the many thousands for each platform.

Officials confirmed that the issue originated in the Atlantic coast of the US at Amazon Web Services, a division that offers vital online framework for a host of companies, who utilize capacity on Amazon servers. The cloud platform is the world’s largest web hosting platform.

Just after midnight (PDT) in the United States (8am BST), officials reported “increased problem frequencies and delays” for the cloud services in a area on the Atlantic seaboard of the US. The ripple effect appeared to affect apps globally, and the problem monitoring service reporting problems with the same sites in different parts of the world.

The outage tracker Thousand Eyes, a platform that tracks online failures, further indicated a surge in outages on Monday morning, and numerous instances situated in the state of Virginia, the location of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where AWS said the outage originated.