Significant Web Disruption Affects Many Online Platforms and Apps

A large-scale web outage has affected numerous websites and apps globally, as users noting issues connecting to the web following issues at Amazon’s online infrastructure service.

The impacted services comprise the social media app Snapchat, Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and Duolingo, as well as several Amazon-managed platforms such as its main retail website and the Ring doorbell company.

Across the United Kingdom, the financial institution Lloyds was impacted in addition to its branches Halifax and the Scottish bank, with also reports of problems reaching the HMRC online portal on the start of the week. Also in the UK, several Ring customers took to social media to state their doorbells were malfunctioning.

Solely in the United Kingdom, accounts of problems on individual applications totaled the many thousands for each platform.

Amazon reported that the problem started in the eastern region of the United States at AWS, a unit that offers crucial online backbone for numerous companies, who rent out capacity on Amazon servers. Amazon Web Services is the world’s largest cloud computing system.

Shortly after midnight (PDT) in the United States (morning UK time), the company announced “higher error rates and latencies” for Amazon's platforms in a zone on the eastern US of the United States. The ripple effect appeared to hit apps globally, with the problem monitoring service indicating outages with the identical platforms in multiple continents.

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