Major Online Outage Affects Many Online Platforms and Mobile Apps

An extensive internet outage has disrupted numerous sites and apps globally, and users noting issues connecting to the web after problems at Amazon’s cloud computing system.

The impacted apps encompass the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, in addition to a host of Amazon-managed platforms like its primary shopping platform and the Ring doorbell home security firm.

Across the United Kingdom, the financial institution Lloyds was affected as well as its branches the bank Halifax and the Scottish bank, with also reports of difficulties accessing the HMRC online portal on the start of the week. Furthermore across the UK, several Ring device owners turned to social media to complain their home gadgets were malfunctioning.

Solely in the United Kingdom, reports of issues on specific apps totaled the tens of thousands for each platform.

Amazon reported that the issue originated in the Atlantic coast of the United States at the cloud division, a unit that provides essential internet backbone for many businesses, who rent out space on the company's servers. The cloud platform is the most extensive cloud computing platform.

Shortly after the start of the day (PDT) in the US (morning UK time), the company announced “higher failure rates and slowdowns” for Amazon's platforms in a region on the eastern US of the United States. The ripple effect seemed to disrupt services worldwide, and the problem monitoring service showing issues with the same sites in different parts of the world.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a platform that reports on internet outages, further indicated a surge in outages on that morning, and numerous instances found in Virginia, the region of the eastern US data center where AWS said the outage originated.