Substantial Online Disruption Affects Dozens Sites and Applications

A large-scale online outage has affected numerous sites and mobile apps around the world, and users reporting problems accessing the internet after problems at Amazon’s web hosting system.

The disrupted apps include the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and Duolingo, along with a host of Amazon-managed operations including its primary shopping site and the Ring doorbell device manufacturer.

In the UK, Lloyds bank was affected along with its subsidiaries Halifax and Bank of Scotland, with further notifications of problems using the HMRC online portal on that morning. Furthermore across the UK, many Ring device owners used online platforms to report their home gadgets were failing.

In the UK alone, accounts of disruptions on particular applications reached the many thousands for each platform.

The company stated that the issue began in the Atlantic coast of the United States at Amazon Web Services, a unit that provides essential online backbone for numerous businesses, who rent out space on the company's servers. Amazon Web Services is the world’s largest online services platform.

Just after late night (PDT) in the United States (morning UK time), officials reported “increased failure rates and slowdowns” for Amazon's platforms in a zone on the eastern US of the United States. The ripple effect seemed to affect platforms worldwide, and the outage tracking website showing issues with the corresponding services in multiple continents.

The outage tracker Thousand Eyes, a service that reports on online failures, additionally noted a surge in issues on Monday morning, with many of them found in Virginia, the site of the AWS US-East-1 zone where the company stated the problems started.