Significant Web Disruption Hits Many Online Platforms and Applications

A widespread online disruption has impacted dozens sites and apps around the world, as users experiencing troubles connecting to the web after problems at Amazon’s online infrastructure service.

The affected apps encompass Snapchat, Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and Duolingo, in addition to a host of Amazon-managed services including its primary shopping site and the Ring security doorbell company.

Across the United Kingdom, Lloyds bank was impacted along with its subsidiaries Halifax and the Scottish bank, with additional accounts of problems reaching the HM Revenue and Customs site on that morning. Furthermore across the UK, multiple Ring device owners used networks to complain their security devices were not working.

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

Amazon reported that the problem originated in the east coast of the United States at Amazon Web Services, a section that provides vital online infrastructure for many companies, who lease resources on AWS infrastructure. The cloud platform is the most extensive cloud computing platform.

Soon after late night (PDT) in the United States (8 in the morning BST), officials reported “higher error rates and latencies” for Amazon's platforms in a region on the Atlantic seaboard of the America. The cascading impact seemed to affect apps worldwide, with the outage tracking website reporting issues with the identical platforms in multiple continents.

The outage tracker Thousand Eyes, a platform that reports on internet outages, also reported a surge in issues on Monday morning, and numerous instances found in Virginia, the location of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where officials confirmed the problems started.