Significant Online Failure Impacts Many Websites and Mobile Apps

A large-scale web failure has impacted numerous websites and apps around the world, as users reporting problems connecting to the web following issues at Amazon’s web hosting platform.

The affected apps encompass Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, in addition to several Amazon-operated operations such as its main retail site and the Ring security doorbell company.

Across the United Kingdom, the financial institution Lloyds was disrupted in addition to its subsidiaries Halifax and Bank of Scotland, with additional accounts of issues using the HM Revenue and Customs site on Monday morning. Furthermore across the UK, several Ring customers took to online platforms to complain their doorbells were malfunctioning.

Just within Britain, notifications of issues on specific applications totaled the thousands for each app.

Officials confirmed that the issue began in the east coast of the US at Amazon Web Services, a section that provides crucial web backbone for a host of firms, who lease capacity on the company's servers. The cloud platform is the biggest global online services platform.

Just after the start of the day (PDT) in the America (8 in the morning BST), Amazon confirmed “higher error rates and slowdowns” for Amazon's platforms in a zone on the Atlantic seaboard of the United States. The cascading impact was seen to hit platforms globally, with the Downdetector site showing issues with the identical platforms in multiple continents.

The outage tracker Thousand Eyes, a tool that reports on web disruptions, further indicated a increase in problems on Monday morning, and numerous instances found in the state of Virginia, the location of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where AWS said the issues started.