Substantial Online Disruption Impacts Many Websites and Applications

An extensive online outage has affected many sites and apps around the world, with users noting issues accessing the internet following issues at Amazon’s online infrastructure system.

The disrupted platforms include Snapchat, Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, along with a host of Amazon-managed services such as its key e-commerce website and the Ring home security firm.

Across the United Kingdom, the financial institution Lloyds was affected as well as its branches Halifax and the Scottish bank, while there were additional accounts of difficulties accessing the HM Revenue and Customs site on that morning. Additionally in Britain, multiple Ring users turned to networks to report their security devices were not working.

Solely in the United Kingdom, notifications of disruptions on particular platforms totaled the many thousands for each platform.

Amazon reported that the issue started in the east coast of the US at the cloud division, a division that provides essential web infrastructure for numerous firms, who utilize resources on AWS infrastructure. The cloud platform is the biggest global web hosting service.

Soon after the start of the day (PDT) in the United States (8 in the morning BST), Amazon confirmed “increased error rates and slowdowns” for Amazon's platforms in a region on the Atlantic seaboard of the US. The widespread consequence was seen to affect services around the world, and the outage tracking website indicating issues with the same sites in different parts of the world.

The outage tracker Thousand Eyes, a platform that reports on online failures, further indicated a increase in problems on that morning, with many of them found in Virginia, the region of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where AWS said the problems originated.