Major Internet Outage Impacts Numerous Online Platforms and Applications

An extensive online failure has impacted many websites and mobile apps globally, and users reporting troubles connecting to the web following issues at the cloud computing platform.

The impacted services include Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, in addition to several Amazon-managed operations like its key e-commerce site and the Ring security doorbell company.

In the UK, Lloyds bank was affected along with its affiliates the bank Halifax and Bank of Scotland, and further notifications of issues accessing the HM Revenue and Customs online portal on Monday morning. Additionally in Britain, many Ring customers turned to online platforms to complain their security devices were failing.

In the UK alone, accounts of disruptions on individual applications reached the thousands for each platform.

Amazon reported that the outage started in the Atlantic coast of the America at the cloud division, a unit that supplies crucial web infrastructure for many companies, who lease space on AWS infrastructure. Amazon Web Services is the biggest global online services service.

Just after midnight (PDT) in the US (8 in the morning BST), the company announced “elevated failure rates and delays” for AWS services in a area on the Atlantic seaboard of the United States. The cascading impact was seen to disrupt services worldwide, with the Downdetector site indicating outages with the same sites in various regions.

The outage tracker Thousand Eyes, a tool that monitors internet outages, further indicated a increase in outages on Monday morning, and numerous instances located in the Virginia area, the location of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where the company stated the outage started.