Substantial Web Disruption Affects Numerous Websites and Mobile Apps

A widespread online failure has disrupted dozens sites and apps around the world, and users reporting problems accessing the internet due to difficulties at Amazon’s web hosting service.

The affected apps encompass Snapchat, Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, along with a host of Amazon-managed services such as its key e-commerce site and the Ring doorbell doorbell company.

In the UK, Lloyds bank was impacted as well as its affiliates Halifax and the Scottish bank, and further notifications of problems reaching the the tax authority online portal on that morning. Also in the UK, multiple Ring device owners turned to online platforms to state their home gadgets were not working.

In the UK alone, reports of problems on specific apps reached the tens of thousands for every service.

Amazon reported that the outage started in the east coast of the America at AWS, a unit that offers vital web infrastructure for many companies, who lease resources on AWS infrastructure. The cloud platform is the world’s largest web hosting service.

Soon after the start of the day (PDT) in the United States (morning UK time), Amazon confirmed “higher failure rates and delays” for Amazon's platforms in a zone on the Atlantic seaboard of the United States. The cascading impact seemed to hit apps around the world, and the Downdetector site reporting issues with the identical platforms in multiple continents.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a tool that monitors online failures, further indicated a surge in problems on that morning, including several cases situated in the Virginia area, the site of the AWS US-East-1 zone where officials confirmed the outage originated.