Major Web Disruption Affects Many Websites and Applications

A widespread web failure has impacted numerous websites and apps worldwide, and users noting problems accessing the internet due to difficulties at Amazon’s web hosting platform.

The disrupted apps include the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and Duolingo, in addition to multiple Amazon-managed platforms like its main retail website and the Ring security doorbell company.

In the UK, Lloyds bank was disrupted along with its affiliates the bank Halifax and Bank of Scotland, with also reports of difficulties reaching the HM Revenue and Customs website on the start of the week. Also in the UK, many Ring customers took to social media to complain their home gadgets were failing.

In the UK alone, reports of issues on individual applications ran into the thousands for each app.

Amazon reported that the outage originated in the eastern region of the America at Amazon Web Services, a section that supplies crucial online backbone for numerous businesses, who rent out resources on AWS infrastructure. The cloud platform is the world’s largest online services service.

Just after midnight (PDT) in the United States (8 in the morning BST), the company announced “increased error rates and latencies” for AWS services in a zone on the east coast of the US. The ripple effect was seen to disrupt platforms globally, with the problem monitoring service showing outages with the same sites in various regions.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a platform that reports on internet outages, additionally noted a increase in issues on the start of the week, with many of them found in the state of Virginia, the site of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where officials confirmed the issues started.