Major Online Outage Hits Many Websites and Apps

A large-scale internet outage has disrupted many sites and apps globally, as users reporting issues connecting to the web after problems at the web hosting platform.

The disrupted services include the social media app Snapchat, Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, along with several Amazon-operated operations such as its key e-commerce platform and the Ring doorbell device manufacturer.

Across the United Kingdom, the financial institution Lloyds was impacted along with its subsidiaries the bank Halifax and the Scottish bank, and additional accounts of problems using the HMRC online portal on that morning. Furthermore across the UK, multiple Ring users took to networks to report their security devices were not working.

In the UK alone, reports of disruptions on individual applications reached the tens of thousands for each platform.

The company stated that the outage began in the eastern region of the America at the cloud division, a division that supplies vital web infrastructure for a host of firms, who utilize resources on Amazon servers. AWS is the biggest global cloud computing service.

Soon after midnight (PDT) in the US (8am BST), the company announced “increased problem frequencies and delays” for the cloud services in a area on the east coast of the America. The widespread consequence was seen to affect apps around the world, with the problem monitoring service showing issues with the same sites in different parts of the world.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a tool that reports on online failures, also reported a surge in issues on the start of the week, and numerous instances located in Virginia, the location of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where the company stated the outage originated.