Substantial Web Failure Hits Numerous Sites and Mobile Apps

A widespread online disruption has disrupted many sites and apps around the world, as users experiencing problems connecting to the web due to difficulties at the web hosting platform.

The impacted apps include the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and Duolingo, as well as a host of Amazon-owned platforms like its main retail platform and the Ring security doorbell company.

Throughout Britain, Lloyds bank was disrupted in addition to its branches Halifax and the Scottish bank, while there were additional accounts of issues accessing the HM Revenue and Customs website on the start of the week. Additionally in Britain, many Ring users took to social media to report their doorbells were malfunctioning.

Just within Britain, accounts of disruptions on specific applications ran into the thousands for each platform.

Amazon reported that the outage originated in the east coast of the United States at the cloud division, a division that offers essential internet backbone for many companies, who utilize resources on AWS infrastructure. AWS is the world’s largest online services system.

Shortly after the start of the day (PDT) in the US (8am BST), officials reported “elevated failure rates and slowdowns” for the cloud services in a area on the Atlantic seaboard of the US. The widespread consequence was seen to affect apps around the world, with the outage tracking website showing outages with the corresponding services in various regions.

The outage tracker Thousand Eyes, a tool that tracks internet outages, additionally noted a rise in issues on that morning, with many of them located in the Virginia area, the site of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where the company stated the problems began.