Significant Online Failure Hits Many Websites and Applications

A large-scale web failure has disrupted numerous sites and mobile apps globally, with users noting problems getting online after problems at Amazon’s online infrastructure system.

The impacted services comprise Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, as well as a host of Amazon-owned services including its key e-commerce website and the Ring doorbell company.

In the UK, the financial institution Lloyds was affected as well as its branches Halifax and the Scottish bank, while there were also reports of issues reaching the HM Revenue and Customs website on the start of the week. Furthermore across the UK, many Ring device owners took to social media to state their security devices were malfunctioning.

Just within Britain, accounts of disruptions on specific platforms reached the many thousands for every service.

The company stated that the issue originated in the east coast of the US at the cloud division, a unit that provides essential online backbone for numerous companies, who lease capacity on Amazon servers. AWS is the most extensive web hosting platform.

Just after the start of the day (PDT) in the US (morning UK time), officials reported “elevated problem frequencies and delays” for the cloud services in a area on the Atlantic seaboard of the America. The cascading impact seemed to disrupt services worldwide, and the problem monitoring service reporting issues with the same sites in multiple continents.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a tool that tracks web disruptions, also reported a surge in issues on Monday morning, and numerous instances found in the state of Virginia, the region of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where the company stated the outage started.