Major Online Outage Affects Dozens Websites and Apps

A large-scale web failure has disrupted many sites and apps worldwide, and users reporting problems getting online due to difficulties at the web hosting service.

The affected services comprise Snapchat, Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, in addition to several Amazon-operated services including its key e-commerce site and the Ring doorbell doorbell company.

In the UK, the financial institution Lloyds was affected as well as its affiliates Halifax and the Scottish bank, with additional accounts of problems reaching the HM Revenue and Customs online portal on the start of the week. Also in the UK, multiple Ring device owners used online platforms to state their doorbells were not working.

Solely in the United Kingdom, accounts of problems on individual apps reached the thousands for each platform.

Officials confirmed that the problem began in the eastern region of the United States at Amazon Web Services, a unit that offers crucial internet framework for a host of companies, who rent out space on Amazon servers. AWS is the world’s largest online services service.

Just after the start of the day (PDT) in the America (8 in the morning BST), the company announced “higher error rates and latencies” for Amazon's platforms in a area on the east coast of the America. The cascading impact seemed to affect apps around the world, with the outage tracking website reporting outages with the corresponding services in different parts of the world.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a service that reports on internet outages, additionally noted a surge in problems on the start of the week, and numerous instances located in Virginia, the site of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where AWS said the problems started.