Major Online Outage Hits Dozens Sites and Applications

A large-scale online outage has disrupted many sites and mobile apps globally, as users experiencing problems getting online following issues at the web hosting service.

The affected services encompass the social media app Snapchat, Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, in addition to multiple Amazon-managed services including its key e-commerce platform and the Ring doorbell home security firm.

Across the United Kingdom, the financial institution Lloyds was affected in addition to its branches the bank Halifax and the Scottish bank, with further notifications of problems using the HM Revenue and Customs website on that morning. Furthermore across the UK, several Ring device owners used online platforms to complain their doorbells were malfunctioning.

Just within Britain, accounts of issues on specific apps reached the tens of thousands for each app.

Amazon reported that the problem started in the east coast of the America at the cloud division, a division that offers essential web backbone for numerous firms, who rent out resources on the company's servers. The cloud platform is the world’s largest web hosting system.

Just after the start of the day (PDT) in the US (morning UK time), the company announced “elevated error rates and latencies” for AWS services in a area on the east coast of the United States. The cascading impact was seen to affect services globally, and the problem monitoring service indicating issues with the corresponding services in multiple continents.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a platform that reports on internet outages, also reported a rise in outages on Monday morning, with many of them situated in the Virginia area, the region of the eastern US data center where AWS said the problems began.