Major Online Disruption Impacts Dozens Online Platforms and Applications

A large-scale web disruption has affected dozens websites and mobile apps globally, and users noting troubles connecting to the web due to difficulties at Amazon’s web hosting platform.

The affected services comprise the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and Duolingo, as well as multiple Amazon-owned platforms including its key e-commerce site and the Ring doorbell device manufacturer.

Across the United Kingdom, the financial institution Lloyds was affected in addition to its branches the bank Halifax and Bank of Scotland, with additional accounts of problems accessing the HMRC online portal on that morning. Additionally in Britain, several Ring device owners turned to online platforms to complain their doorbells were not working.

Solely in the United Kingdom, notifications of issues on individual apps ran into the thousands for each platform.

The company stated that the issue began in the eastern region of the US at Amazon Web Services, a division that provides essential internet infrastructure for a host of businesses, who lease resources on the company's servers. The cloud platform is the world’s largest web hosting system.

Just after the start of the day (PDT) in the America (morning UK time), Amazon confirmed “higher error rates and latencies” for AWS services in a area on the eastern US of the United States. The widespread consequence seemed to disrupt platforms globally, with the outage tracking website reporting issues with the corresponding services in multiple continents.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a tool that monitors internet outages, also reported a surge in problems on that morning, including several cases located in Virginia, the location of the AWS US-East-1 zone where the company stated the issues originated.