Major Internet Outage Hits Many Sites and Mobile Apps

An extensive online outage has disrupted numerous sites and apps globally, with users noting troubles connecting to the web following issues at the cloud computing platform.

The disrupted platforms comprise Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, and Duolingo, along with several Amazon-managed operations including its main retail website and the Ring security home security firm.

Throughout Britain, Lloyds bank was disrupted along with its subsidiaries the bank Halifax and the Scottish bank, and also reports of problems accessing the HMRC website on that morning. Furthermore across the UK, many Ring users turned to social media to report their doorbells were malfunctioning.

In the UK alone, notifications of problems on specific platforms reached the tens of thousands for each platform.

Officials confirmed that the outage began in the Atlantic coast of the US at Amazon Web Services, a unit that supplies vital internet framework for many firms, who lease resources on Amazon servers. AWS is the world’s largest online services service.

Soon after the start of the day (PDT) in the United States (morning UK time), the company announced “elevated error rates and slowdowns” for the cloud services in a area on the eastern US of the America. The cascading impact seemed to disrupt apps globally, with the outage tracking website indicating problems with the corresponding services in various regions.

The outage tracker Thousand Eyes, a platform that reports on online failures, further indicated a rise in problems on that morning, with many of them located in the Virginia area, the location of the AWS US-East-1 zone where officials confirmed the issues originated.