Major Online Outage Affects Dozens Sites and Mobile Apps

A widespread web outage has impacted numerous sites and mobile apps around the world, with users experiencing problems connecting to the web following issues at Amazon’s web hosting platform.

The impacted platforms include Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, in addition to several Amazon-managed services including its primary shopping platform and the Ring security device manufacturer.

Across the United Kingdom, the financial institution Lloyds was impacted as well as its affiliates Halifax and Bank of Scotland, and additional accounts of problems reaching the HM Revenue and Customs website on Monday morning. Additionally in Britain, multiple Ring customers used social media to complain their security devices were malfunctioning.

In the UK alone, accounts of problems on specific applications ran into the thousands for each app.

Officials confirmed that the outage started in the east coast of the US at the cloud division, a division that supplies crucial web framework for numerous firms, who utilize capacity on AWS infrastructure. AWS is the biggest global web hosting platform.

Shortly after the start of the day (PDT) in the United States (8 in the morning BST), officials reported “increased failure rates and latencies” for Amazon's platforms in a zone on the eastern US of the America. The cascading impact was seen to affect platforms worldwide, with the outage tracking website indicating outages with the corresponding services in various regions.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a service that tracks web disruptions, also reported a surge in issues on that morning, with many of them situated in Virginia, the site of the AWS US-East-1 zone where the company stated the issues began.