Major Internet Disruption Hits Numerous Sites and Apps

A large-scale online failure has impacted dozens online platforms and applications globally, with users noting problems accessing the internet following issues at the cloud computing service.

The impacted apps include the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and Duolingo, as well as multiple Amazon-operated operations including its main retail site and the Ring doorbell doorbell company.

Across the United Kingdom, Lloyds bank was disrupted along with its affiliates Halifax and Bank of Scotland, while there were additional accounts of issues using the HM Revenue and Customs online portal on Monday morning. Furthermore across the UK, many Ring device owners used social media to report their home gadgets were failing.

Solely in the United Kingdom, accounts of problems on specific apps ran into the thousands for each app.

The company stated that the outage began in the east coast of the United States at AWS, a section that supplies crucial web infrastructure for a host of firms, who rent out capacity on the company's servers. Amazon Web Services is the world’s largest cloud computing service.

Shortly after late night (PDT) in the United States (morning UK time), Amazon confirmed “elevated problem frequencies and slowdowns” for Amazon's platforms in a zone on the eastern US of the US. The widespread consequence was seen to disrupt apps worldwide, with the problem monitoring service reporting outages with the same sites in different parts of the world.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a service that tracks internet outages, also reported a increase in issues on the start of the week, with many of them located in Virginia, the site of the AWS US-East-1 zone where the company stated the problems started.