Substantial Online Failure Impacts Dozens Websites and Apps

A large-scale online disruption has disrupted many online platforms and applications globally, as users noting issues getting online after problems at the web hosting platform.

The impacted services comprise the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and Duolingo, in addition to several Amazon-managed platforms like its main retail platform and the Ring doorbell company.

Throughout Britain, Lloyds bank was disrupted along with its affiliates Halifax and Bank of Scotland, and further notifications of problems using the the tax authority site on that morning. Furthermore across the UK, multiple Ring customers turned to online platforms to complain their security devices were not working.

In the UK alone, notifications of disruptions on particular platforms reached the tens of thousands for each platform.

Amazon reported that the issue originated in the east coast of the America at the cloud division, a section that supplies essential web backbone for a host of businesses, who rent out capacity on AWS infrastructure. The cloud platform is the world’s largest web hosting service.

Shortly after midnight (PDT) in the United States (8 in the morning BST), the company announced “higher error rates and slowdowns” for AWS services in a zone on the Atlantic seaboard of the United States. The cascading impact was seen to disrupt platforms worldwide, with the problem monitoring service showing issues with the same sites in multiple continents.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a tool that tracks internet outages, also reported a rise in outages on that morning, with many of them situated in the state of Virginia, the location of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where the company stated the outage began.