Major Internet Disruption Impacts Many Sites and Mobile Apps

An extensive web disruption has affected many online platforms and apps globally, with users experiencing issues connecting to the web due to difficulties at Amazon’s online infrastructure platform.

The disrupted platforms comprise the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and Duolingo, along with multiple Amazon-managed platforms such as its key e-commerce site and the Ring security doorbell company.

Throughout Britain, Lloyds bank was impacted along with its branches Halifax and the Scottish bank, while there were also reports of issues using the HMRC website on Monday morning. Also in the UK, multiple Ring device owners turned to networks to state their home gadgets were not working.

Just within Britain, reports of issues on individual platforms ran into the tens of thousands for every service.

Officials confirmed that the outage originated in the Atlantic coast of the United States at AWS, a division that provides vital web framework for many companies, who lease capacity on Amazon servers. The cloud platform is the biggest global cloud computing system.

Soon after midnight (PDT) in the US (morning UK time), Amazon confirmed “higher problem frequencies and slowdowns” for Amazon's platforms in a region on the Atlantic seaboard of the US. The ripple effect appeared to affect platforms around the world, and the problem monitoring service showing issues with the same sites in various regions.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a platform that monitors online failures, further indicated a rise in outages on the start of the week, including several cases found in Virginia, the site of the eastern US data center where officials confirmed the outage began.

Lauren Wilson
Lauren Wilson

Tech enthusiast and startup advisor with a passion for driving innovation and sharing actionable insights.