Major Web Outage Impacts Many Sites and Applications

An extensive web outage has impacted many online platforms and applications around the world, as users experiencing troubles connecting to the web due to difficulties at Amazon’s cloud computing service.

The impacted services include Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, along with several Amazon-managed services like its primary shopping website and the Ring security doorbell company.

Across the United Kingdom, Lloyds bank was affected along with its affiliates the bank Halifax and Bank of Scotland, with further notifications of difficulties reaching the HMRC website on the start of the week. Furthermore across the UK, many Ring device owners turned to social media to state their doorbells were failing.

In the UK alone, reports of problems on individual apps totaled the many thousands for every service.

Amazon reported that the outage originated in the east coast of the US at the cloud division, a division that supplies vital online backbone for a host of companies, who rent out resources on AWS infrastructure. AWS is the most extensive web hosting service.

Soon after the start of the day (PDT) in the US (8 in the morning BST), officials reported “increased problem frequencies and slowdowns” for the cloud services in a area on the Atlantic seaboard of the America. The ripple effect was seen to disrupt services worldwide, with the Downdetector site indicating issues with the same sites in various regions.

The outage tracker Thousand Eyes, a tool that tracks online failures, additionally noted a surge in issues on Monday morning, and numerous instances situated in the state of Virginia, the region of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where the company stated the issues started.