Major Web Disruption Impacts Dozens Websites and Apps

A large-scale internet disruption has disrupted dozens online platforms and apps around the world, as users noting problems accessing the internet after problems at Amazon’s cloud computing system.

The affected apps include the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, as well as several Amazon-managed platforms such as its primary shopping site and the Ring doorbell device manufacturer.

Across the United Kingdom, the financial institution Lloyds was disrupted in addition to its subsidiaries the bank Halifax and the Scottish bank, with further notifications of difficulties reaching the HMRC site on Monday morning. Also in the UK, multiple Ring customers took to social media to report their security devices were not working.

Solely in the United Kingdom, notifications of disruptions on particular platforms ran into the many thousands for every service.

The company stated that the problem started in the Atlantic coast of the US at AWS, a section that offers crucial online infrastructure for many businesses, who lease capacity on Amazon servers. The cloud platform is the world’s largest web hosting service.

Soon after midnight (PDT) in the US (morning UK time), the company announced “increased problem frequencies and latencies” for Amazon's platforms in a region on the Atlantic seaboard of the US. The widespread consequence seemed to hit services around the world, and the problem monitoring service indicating issues with the same sites in different parts of the world.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a service that reports on online failures, further indicated a rise in problems on the start of the week, and numerous instances situated in the Virginia area, the location of the eastern US data center where officials confirmed the outage started.