Substantial Web Failure Impacts Many Websites and Apps

A large-scale online disruption has affected numerous websites and applications worldwide, with users reporting issues accessing the internet after problems at the online infrastructure platform.

The impacted apps include the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and Duolingo, along with a host of Amazon-managed services like its primary shopping platform and the Ring home security firm.

In the UK, the financial institution Lloyds was impacted as well as its subsidiaries the bank Halifax and Bank of Scotland, and additional accounts of issues using the HMRC website on that morning. Also in the UK, many Ring customers took to social media to report their security devices were failing.

Just within Britain, notifications of issues on individual apps reached the tens of thousands for each app.

The company stated that the issue started in the eastern region of the United States at AWS, a unit that provides essential internet infrastructure for a host of companies, who utilize capacity on AWS infrastructure. AWS is the world’s largest cloud computing platform.

Just after midnight (PDT) in the US (8 in the morning BST), Amazon confirmed “elevated error rates and latencies” for Amazon's platforms in a zone on the east coast of the United States. The widespread consequence appeared to affect services around the world, with the Downdetector site showing outages with the identical platforms in multiple continents.

The outage tracker Thousand Eyes, a platform that monitors online failures, also reported a rise in issues on that morning, including several cases located in Virginia, the site of the eastern US data center where AWS said the outage started.