Significant Web Disruption Affects Many Sites and Applications

A widespread online outage has disrupted numerous online platforms and applications worldwide, and users reporting troubles connecting to the web following issues at Amazon’s online infrastructure service.

The disrupted platforms comprise Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, along with multiple Amazon-operated platforms such as its key e-commerce platform and the Ring doorbell doorbell company.

In the UK, Lloyds bank was affected in addition to its subsidiaries Halifax and Bank of Scotland, and also reports of difficulties using the HMRC site on that morning. Furthermore across the UK, many Ring users used social media to report their doorbells were failing.

Just within Britain, accounts of issues on individual applications ran into the tens of thousands for each app.

Amazon reported that the problem started in the Atlantic coast of the US at AWS, a section that provides crucial internet framework for numerous firms, who rent out capacity on AWS infrastructure. Amazon Web Services is the biggest global online services platform.

Soon after the start of the day (PDT) in the US (8am BST), the company announced “increased problem frequencies and latencies” for the cloud services in a area on the eastern US of the America. The ripple effect was seen to hit apps around the world, with the problem monitoring service showing issues with the corresponding services in multiple continents.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a service that reports on web disruptions, also reported a increase in issues on Monday morning, with many of them located in Virginia, the site of the AWS US-East-1 zone where officials confirmed the issues started.