Substantial Online Outage Hits Numerous Websites and Apps

An extensive online disruption has impacted numerous websites and mobile apps worldwide, with users reporting troubles connecting to the web following issues at the web hosting system.

The disrupted apps comprise Snapchat, Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and Duolingo, along with multiple Amazon-owned operations such as its key e-commerce website and the Ring doorbell device manufacturer.

Across the United Kingdom, Lloyds bank was impacted as well as its subsidiaries the bank Halifax and the Scottish bank, with further notifications of issues reaching the HMRC site on the start of the week. Furthermore across the UK, multiple Ring device owners took to networks to complain their doorbells were not working.

Solely in the United Kingdom, notifications of disruptions on specific apps ran into the tens of thousands for each platform.

Officials confirmed that the problem originated in the Atlantic coast of the United States at Amazon Web Services, a division that offers crucial online infrastructure for numerous businesses, who rent out resources on Amazon servers. Amazon Web Services is the world’s largest online services system.

Shortly after the start of the day (PDT) in the United States (8am BST), the company announced “higher error rates and slowdowns” for AWS services in a region on the eastern US of the United States. The ripple effect appeared to hit services globally, and the Downdetector site indicating problems with the corresponding services in multiple continents.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a platform that monitors online failures, further indicated a surge in outages on that morning, including several cases found in the state of Virginia, the site of the AWS US-East-1 zone where the company stated the issues started.