Major Internet Disruption Hits Dozens Websites and Applications

A large-scale internet failure has impacted many online platforms and applications globally, and users noting problems getting online after problems at Amazon’s online infrastructure system.

The disrupted services encompass the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, as well as several Amazon-managed services like its main retail platform and the Ring doorbell home security firm.

In the UK, Lloyds bank was affected in addition to its subsidiaries the bank Halifax and the Scottish bank, while there were further notifications of difficulties reaching the HM Revenue and Customs online portal on Monday morning. Furthermore across the UK, multiple Ring customers turned to networks to report their home gadgets were malfunctioning.

Just within Britain, reports of disruptions on specific platforms totaled the tens of thousands for each app.

Amazon reported that the outage started in the Atlantic coast of the US at the cloud division, a division that supplies essential online infrastructure for many companies, who lease capacity on Amazon servers. Amazon Web Services is the world’s largest online services system.

Soon after midnight (PDT) in the US (8 in the morning BST), the company announced “higher error rates and delays” for AWS services in a region on the Atlantic seaboard of the America. The ripple effect seemed to hit apps globally, with the outage tracking website showing problems with the same sites in various regions.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a service that tracks internet outages, further indicated a surge in issues on the start of the week, with many of them located in the Virginia area, the location of the eastern US data center where AWS said the problems began.