Significant Web Disruption Hits Many Online Platforms and Apps

A large-scale online disruption has affected dozens websites and mobile apps around the world, and users reporting troubles connecting to the web after problems at the cloud computing service.

The impacted platforms encompass the social media app Snapchat, Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, in addition to several Amazon-operated services like its main retail site and the Ring doorbell doorbell company.

Across the United Kingdom, the financial institution Lloyds was impacted in addition to its subsidiaries the bank Halifax and Bank of Scotland, while there were additional accounts of difficulties using the HM Revenue and Customs online portal on the start of the week. Additionally in Britain, many Ring users used social media to complain their doorbells were not working.

In the UK alone, notifications of issues on specific platforms reached the tens of thousands for each app.

The company stated that the issue started in the Atlantic coast of the US at Amazon Web Services, a division that offers vital online infrastructure for a host of firms, who lease resources on Amazon servers. Amazon Web Services is the most extensive cloud computing service.

Shortly after midnight (PDT) in the United States (morning UK time), Amazon confirmed “increased error rates and delays” for Amazon's platforms in a region on the Atlantic seaboard of the US. The cascading impact was seen to disrupt apps around the world, and the Downdetector site reporting problems with the identical platforms in multiple continents.

The outage tracker Thousand Eyes, a tool that reports on internet outages, additionally noted a increase in problems on that morning, and numerous instances located in Virginia, the region of the AWS US-East-1 zone where AWS said the outage began.