Major Web Disruption Impacts Many Sites and Apps

A widespread online outage has impacted many online platforms and applications worldwide, with users reporting problems connecting to the web following issues at Amazon’s web hosting service.

The disrupted services include Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, and Duolingo, along with several Amazon-owned platforms including its main retail site and the Ring home security firm.

In the UK, Lloyds bank was disrupted along with its subsidiaries Halifax and the Scottish bank, while there were additional accounts of issues using the the tax authority site on the start of the week. Additionally in Britain, several Ring device owners took to social media to report their security devices were not working.

Just within Britain, reports of problems on individual platforms ran into the many thousands for each platform.

The company stated that the outage started in the eastern region of the US at AWS, a unit that provides crucial web backbone for many companies, who rent out capacity on the company's servers. The cloud platform is the most extensive cloud computing platform.

Just after midnight (PDT) in the United States (8 in the morning BST), officials reported “elevated error rates and slowdowns” for AWS services in a zone on the Atlantic seaboard of the America. The ripple effect seemed to hit apps around the world, with the outage tracking website reporting problems with the same sites in different parts of the world.

The outage tracker Thousand Eyes, a platform that monitors web disruptions, further indicated a rise in outages on the start of the week, with many of them situated in the state of Virginia, the site of the eastern US data center where the company stated the outage originated.