Major Internet Failure Impacts Dozens Sites and Applications

A large-scale online outage has impacted dozens online platforms and apps around the world, and users experiencing troubles accessing the internet following issues at the web hosting platform.

The disrupted platforms encompass Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, in addition to a host of Amazon-owned services like its key e-commerce site and the Ring security doorbell company.

In the UK, the financial institution Lloyds was impacted in addition to its branches the bank Halifax and Bank of Scotland, while there were also reports of issues using the HMRC online portal on that morning. Additionally in Britain, multiple Ring device owners used online platforms to report their security devices were not working.

In the UK alone, reports of problems on particular apps totaled the tens of thousands for every service.

Amazon reported that the problem started in the eastern region of the US at Amazon Web Services, a section that supplies vital web infrastructure for numerous firms, who rent out capacity on AWS infrastructure. Amazon Web Services is the biggest global cloud computing service.

Just after midnight (PDT) in the United States (morning UK time), Amazon confirmed “elevated problem frequencies and latencies” for the cloud services in a area on the east coast of the US. The ripple effect seemed to disrupt services worldwide, with the outage tracking website indicating problems with the corresponding services in different parts of the world.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a tool that reports on web disruptions, also reported a surge in outages on the start of the week, including several cases located in Virginia, the location of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where the company stated the outage began.