Substantial Internet Disruption Impacts Many Websites and Mobile Apps

A widespread internet outage has disrupted dozens sites and apps worldwide, with users noting troubles accessing the internet due to difficulties at Amazon’s online infrastructure system.

The affected platforms comprise the social media app Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, and Duolingo, along with multiple Amazon-operated operations such as its main retail website and the Ring security home security firm.

In the UK, the financial institution Lloyds was disrupted as well as its affiliates the bank Halifax and the Scottish bank, and additional accounts of problems reaching the HMRC online portal on the start of the week. Furthermore across the UK, several Ring customers took to online platforms to complain their doorbells were not working.

In the UK alone, reports of problems on particular applications reached the tens of thousands for each app.

Officials confirmed that the issue originated in the Atlantic coast of the America at Amazon Web Services, a section that provides crucial web infrastructure for a host of companies, who rent out resources on AWS infrastructure. The cloud platform is the most extensive online services system.

Just after late night (PDT) in the United States (8 in the morning BST), Amazon confirmed “higher problem frequencies and latencies” for Amazon's platforms in a area on the eastern US of the America. The widespread consequence seemed to affect apps globally, and the Downdetector site indicating issues with the corresponding services in various regions.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a service that reports on internet outages, further indicated a surge in outages on that morning, with many of them situated in the state of Virginia, the location of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where AWS said the issues started.