Significant Web Outage Hits Many Sites and Applications

An extensive online outage has impacted many websites and mobile apps globally, with users reporting problems connecting to the web due to difficulties at the online infrastructure platform.

The affected platforms encompass Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and Duolingo, in addition to several Amazon-owned platforms such as its primary shopping site and the Ring security device manufacturer.

In the UK, Lloyds bank was impacted as well as its subsidiaries the bank Halifax and the Scottish bank, while there were additional accounts of difficulties reaching the HM Revenue and Customs online portal on the start of the week. Also in the UK, many Ring device owners turned to online platforms to state their security devices were failing.

Just within Britain, notifications of problems on particular apps totaled the many thousands for each app.

Officials confirmed that the outage originated in the Atlantic coast of the United States at the cloud division, a unit that supplies crucial web infrastructure for many businesses, who lease capacity on AWS infrastructure. Amazon Web Services is the world’s largest web hosting platform.

Soon after midnight (PDT) in the America (8 in the morning BST), Amazon confirmed “higher failure rates and slowdowns” for Amazon's platforms in a region on the east coast of the America. The widespread consequence seemed to disrupt apps around the world, and the outage tracking website indicating outages with the corresponding services in multiple continents.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a tool that monitors online failures, additionally noted a rise in problems on that morning, including several cases located in the Virginia area, the region of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where the company stated the issues originated.