Substantial Internet Disruption Affects Dozens Sites and Mobile Apps

A large-scale online disruption has impacted dozens online platforms and apps worldwide, and users reporting issues getting online due to difficulties at Amazon’s online infrastructure platform.

The impacted platforms comprise Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, in addition to several Amazon-operated platforms including its main retail site and the Ring security doorbell company.

In the UK, the financial institution Lloyds was affected in addition to its subsidiaries the bank Halifax and the Scottish bank, and also reports of difficulties reaching the HMRC website on the start of the week. Additionally in Britain, multiple Ring device owners took to social media to complain their security devices were not working.

Solely in the United Kingdom, accounts of disruptions on specific platforms ran into the tens of thousands for every service.

The company stated that the problem originated in the east coast of the America at Amazon Web Services, a division that offers essential online infrastructure for many businesses, who lease resources on AWS infrastructure. AWS is the biggest global web hosting platform.

Just after late night (PDT) in the US (8 in the morning BST), officials reported “elevated failure rates and latencies” for Amazon's platforms in a zone on the east coast of the America. The cascading impact appeared to hit services around the world, and the problem monitoring service indicating problems with the same sites in multiple continents.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a service that monitors web disruptions, also reported a rise in outages on that morning, and numerous instances located in the Virginia area, the location of the eastern US data center where the company stated the outage began.