Substantial Web Disruption Impacts Numerous Sites and Apps

A large-scale internet failure has disrupted numerous online platforms and apps around the world, with users reporting troubles connecting to the web after problems at the cloud computing service.

The impacted platforms encompass the social media app Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, as well as several Amazon-owned services such as its key e-commerce website and the Ring home security firm.

In the UK, the financial institution Lloyds was affected in addition to its affiliates Halifax and the Scottish bank, while there were further notifications of difficulties accessing the HMRC website on the start of the week. Furthermore across the UK, many Ring users took to online platforms to state their home gadgets were malfunctioning.

Solely in the United Kingdom, notifications of disruptions on specific apps totaled the tens of thousands for each app.

Officials confirmed that the outage began in the eastern region of the US at AWS, a section that offers essential online backbone for a host of businesses, who rent out resources on Amazon servers. AWS is the most extensive cloud computing platform.

Just after the start of the day (PDT) in the United States (8am BST), Amazon confirmed “higher error rates and latencies” for the cloud services in a zone on the eastern US of the US. The cascading impact appeared to disrupt services worldwide, with the problem monitoring service showing outages with the same sites in multiple continents.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a platform that tracks web disruptions, also reported a rise in problems on that morning, including several cases found in the state of Virginia, the location of the eastern US data center where AWS said the problems originated.