Major Online Disruption Impacts Many Sites and Apps

A widespread web failure has disrupted numerous online platforms and apps worldwide, as users reporting issues connecting to the web due to difficulties at Amazon’s web hosting service.

The disrupted platforms include the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and Duolingo, along with a host of Amazon-managed platforms such as its main retail site and the Ring doorbell company.

Across the United Kingdom, the financial institution Lloyds was disrupted in addition to its branches Halifax and Bank of Scotland, while there were further notifications of difficulties accessing the the tax authority website on the start of the week. Additionally in Britain, many Ring users took to social media to report their security devices were failing.

In the UK alone, accounts of issues on specific apps totaled the tens of thousands for each app.

The company stated that the issue started in the Atlantic coast of the America at AWS, a section that supplies essential web infrastructure for numerous companies, who utilize capacity on Amazon servers. AWS is the most extensive online services system.

Just after late night (PDT) in the United States (8am BST), the company announced “elevated error rates and latencies” for Amazon's platforms in a zone on the east coast of the US. The cascading impact was seen to disrupt apps around the world, and the outage tracking website indicating problems with the identical platforms in different parts of the world.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a platform that monitors web disruptions, additionally noted a rise in problems on the start of the week, including several cases located in the Virginia area, the site of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where the company stated the outage originated.