Significant Online Outage Impacts Numerous Sites and Applications

A large-scale online failure has affected numerous sites and apps around the world, as users noting troubles accessing the internet due to difficulties at Amazon’s cloud computing system.

The impacted apps include the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and Duolingo, along with multiple Amazon-operated services such as its key e-commerce site and the Ring doorbell company.

Across the United Kingdom, the financial institution Lloyds was affected along with its subsidiaries the bank Halifax and the Scottish bank, and additional accounts of difficulties accessing the HM Revenue and Customs site on Monday morning. Additionally in Britain, multiple Ring device owners took to online platforms to report their home gadgets were malfunctioning.

In the UK alone, notifications of problems on individual apps ran into the many thousands for each platform.

The company stated that the problem began in the Atlantic coast of the US at AWS, a division that supplies essential internet backbone for numerous companies, who rent out capacity on Amazon servers. AWS is the most extensive online services platform.

Just after late night (PDT) in the America (morning UK time), Amazon confirmed “elevated error rates and slowdowns” for Amazon's platforms in a zone on the eastern US of the US. The widespread consequence was seen to hit services around the world, and the Downdetector site showing outages with the identical platforms in different parts of the world.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a platform that monitors online failures, also reported a surge in outages on that morning, including several cases situated in the state of Virginia, the region of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where the company stated the problems started.