Significant Online Outage Impacts Numerous Online Platforms and Mobile Apps

An extensive online disruption has disrupted numerous websites and mobile apps around the world, with users experiencing problems accessing the internet after problems at the online infrastructure service.

The affected apps encompass the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and Duolingo, along with a host of Amazon-managed services like its primary shopping website and the Ring doorbell home security firm.

In the UK, the financial institution Lloyds was impacted as well as its subsidiaries Halifax and Bank of Scotland, with additional accounts of difficulties reaching the HMRC online portal on Monday morning. Also in the UK, several Ring device owners turned to networks to report their home gadgets were failing.

In the UK alone, accounts of disruptions on specific applications ran into the many thousands for each app.

Amazon reported that the outage started in the eastern region of the United States at Amazon Web Services, a unit that offers vital web backbone for a host of companies, who utilize capacity on the company's servers. The cloud platform is the biggest global cloud computing system.

Just after late night (PDT) in the US (morning UK time), Amazon confirmed “higher failure rates and slowdowns” for AWS services in a zone on the eastern US of the US. The cascading impact seemed to hit apps globally, with the Downdetector site showing issues with the same sites in various regions.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a tool that monitors online failures, further indicated a rise in issues on the start of the week, with many of them situated in the state of Virginia, the site of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where AWS said the problems started.