Significant Online Disruption Hits Numerous Online Platforms and Mobile Apps

An extensive internet disruption has impacted numerous sites and applications globally, with users noting issues accessing the internet after problems at Amazon’s online infrastructure system.

The impacted services comprise the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and Duolingo, in addition to a host of Amazon-managed services such as its primary shopping website and the Ring security device manufacturer.

In the UK, Lloyds bank was impacted as well as its affiliates the bank Halifax and the Scottish bank, and also reports of issues accessing the HM Revenue and Customs online portal on Monday morning. Additionally in Britain, many Ring users took to online platforms to complain their security devices were failing.

Just within Britain, accounts of disruptions on particular apps ran into the many thousands for each platform.

The company stated that the problem originated in the eastern region of the US at Amazon Web Services, a division that provides crucial web infrastructure for numerous companies, who rent out capacity on the company's servers. The cloud platform is the most extensive cloud computing service.

Just after the start of the day (PDT) in the United States (morning UK time), Amazon confirmed “elevated error rates and latencies” for AWS services in a region on the Atlantic seaboard of the US. The cascading impact appeared to disrupt platforms worldwide, and the Downdetector site indicating problems with the identical platforms in different parts of the world.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a tool that tracks web disruptions, also reported a surge in problems on that morning, with many of them located in the Virginia area, the location of the eastern US data center where officials confirmed the problems started.