Substantial Online Outage Affects Numerous Online Platforms and Apps

A widespread internet outage has affected many sites and mobile apps around the world, and users reporting issues getting online due to difficulties at the web hosting service.

The impacted platforms comprise Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, as well as multiple Amazon-managed operations such as its key e-commerce website and the Ring security doorbell company.

In the UK, the financial institution Lloyds was disrupted as well as its branches the bank Halifax and the Scottish bank, and also reports of issues accessing the HM Revenue and Customs website on Monday morning. Furthermore across the UK, many Ring users took to online platforms to complain their doorbells were malfunctioning.

In the UK alone, reports of issues on individual platforms totaled the thousands for every service.

Officials confirmed that the problem started in the eastern region of the United States at AWS, a division that offers essential internet infrastructure for numerous companies, who rent out capacity on AWS infrastructure. AWS is the world’s largest cloud computing service.

Just after midnight (PDT) in the United States (8 in the morning BST), the company announced “increased problem frequencies and delays” for the cloud services in a zone on the eastern US of the United States. The ripple effect appeared to disrupt services globally, and the Downdetector site showing problems with the identical platforms in different parts of the world.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a platform that tracks internet outages, further indicated a increase in issues on that morning, including several cases located in Virginia, the region of the eastern US data center where AWS said the outage began.