Substantial Web Failure Impacts Dozens Sites and Apps

A widespread internet outage has impacted numerous sites and apps around the world, and users noting issues connecting to the web after problems at Amazon’s web hosting service.

The affected apps include the social media app Snapchat, Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and Duolingo, as well as several Amazon-owned services such as its main retail website and the Ring doorbell home security firm.

Throughout Britain, the financial institution Lloyds was disrupted along with its branches the bank Halifax and the Scottish bank, while there were further notifications of issues using the the tax authority website on the start of the week. Also in the UK, multiple Ring device owners took to social media to report their home gadgets were failing.

In the UK alone, notifications of issues on individual applications reached the tens of thousands for each app.

The company stated that the outage started in the Atlantic coast of the US at Amazon Web Services, a division that provides essential web framework for many companies, who rent out capacity on AWS infrastructure. AWS is the biggest global web hosting platform.

Shortly after midnight (PDT) in the US (morning UK time), the company announced “higher failure rates and slowdowns” for AWS services in a area on the eastern US of the United States. The cascading impact seemed to disrupt services worldwide, with the problem monitoring service showing issues with the corresponding services in multiple continents.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a tool that monitors online failures, further indicated a increase in outages on the start of the week, including several cases located in the Virginia area, the location of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where officials confirmed the issues originated.