Substantial Internet Failure Hits Many Online Platforms and Applications

An extensive online failure has impacted dozens online platforms and apps around the world, and users reporting issues getting online after problems at Amazon’s cloud computing service.

The impacted platforms include the social media app Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, in addition to a host of Amazon-operated services such as its main retail website and the Ring security home security firm.

Across the United Kingdom, Lloyds bank was affected along with its subsidiaries Halifax and Bank of Scotland, with also reports of difficulties accessing the the tax authority website on Monday morning. Also in the UK, several Ring device owners took to networks to complain their doorbells were not working.

Just within Britain, reports of problems on particular apps reached the thousands for every service.

Officials confirmed that the problem originated in the east coast of the US at Amazon Web Services, a section that provides essential web infrastructure for many firms, who rent out space on AWS infrastructure. Amazon Web Services is the world’s largest web hosting system.

Just after late night (PDT) in the US (morning UK time), the company announced “higher error rates and latencies” for the cloud services in a area on the east coast of the United States. The cascading impact seemed to disrupt services around the world, with the Downdetector site indicating outages with the identical platforms in various regions.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a platform that monitors internet outages, further indicated a surge in problems on that morning, with many of them located in Virginia, the region of the eastern US data center where AWS said the outage began.