Substantial Online Disruption Impacts Many Sites and Mobile Apps

An extensive online failure has affected numerous online platforms and apps around the world, as users experiencing issues connecting to the web due to difficulties at Amazon’s online infrastructure service.

The affected apps encompass the social media app Snapchat, Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and Duolingo, along with multiple Amazon-operated services such as its key e-commerce platform and the Ring home security firm.

In the UK, the financial institution Lloyds was disrupted along with its affiliates Halifax and Bank of Scotland, with additional accounts of problems reaching the HMRC online portal on Monday morning. Additionally in Britain, multiple Ring device owners used online platforms to state their home gadgets were failing.

Just within Britain, reports of issues on specific applications totaled the tens of thousands for each platform.

Amazon reported that the outage originated in the eastern region of the US at the cloud division, a division that provides crucial web framework for many firms, who utilize resources on AWS infrastructure. The cloud platform is the most extensive web hosting service.

Just after the start of the day (PDT) in the United States (8 in the morning BST), officials reported “elevated problem frequencies and delays” for AWS services in a zone on the east coast of the America. The cascading impact was seen to disrupt apps globally, and the outage tracking website indicating outages with the same sites in multiple continents.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a service that monitors online failures, further indicated a rise in issues on the start of the week, and numerous instances located in the Virginia area, the location of the AWS US-East-1 zone where officials confirmed the issues originated.