Significant Online Outage Affects Dozens Online Platforms and Apps

An extensive web disruption has impacted numerous online platforms and mobile apps worldwide, and users noting troubles connecting to the web after problems at Amazon’s web hosting platform.

The disrupted apps include the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, along with a host of Amazon-owned platforms such as its key e-commerce site and the Ring home security firm.

In the UK, the financial institution Lloyds was disrupted as well as its affiliates the bank Halifax and Bank of Scotland, while there were further notifications of issues using the HMRC site on Monday morning. Additionally in Britain, multiple Ring customers turned to social media to state their security devices were malfunctioning.

In the UK alone, accounts of problems on particular applications ran into the many thousands for each platform.

Officials confirmed that the problem started in the Atlantic coast of the United States at the cloud division, a section that offers vital internet backbone for numerous businesses, who utilize resources on Amazon servers. AWS is the most extensive online services platform.

Just after late night (PDT) in the US (morning UK time), Amazon confirmed “elevated error rates and latencies” for AWS services in a zone on the eastern US of the US. The cascading impact seemed to affect platforms worldwide, with the Downdetector site reporting issues with the identical platforms in multiple continents.

The outage tracker Thousand Eyes, a tool that monitors internet outages, further indicated a surge in outages on the start of the week, and numerous instances found in Virginia, the region of the AWS US-East-1 zone where officials confirmed the issues originated.