Substantial Online Outage Hits Many Online Platforms and Mobile Apps

An extensive web outage has impacted dozens online platforms and mobile apps globally, with users experiencing problems accessing the internet following issues at Amazon’s online infrastructure platform.

The impacted apps comprise Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and Duolingo, along with a host of Amazon-owned services such as its main retail website and the Ring doorbell company.

Throughout Britain, the financial institution Lloyds was disrupted in addition to its subsidiaries Halifax and Bank of Scotland, while there were also reports of problems accessing the the tax authority site on that morning. Also in the UK, several Ring device owners took to online platforms to report their security devices were malfunctioning.

Just within Britain, reports of issues on individual apps ran into the many thousands for each app.

The company stated that the problem began in the Atlantic coast of the America at Amazon Web Services, a division that provides vital internet backbone for many firms, who utilize capacity on Amazon servers. Amazon Web Services is the world’s largest cloud computing platform.

Shortly after the start of the day (PDT) in the US (morning UK time), Amazon confirmed “increased error rates and slowdowns” for the cloud services in a area on the east coast of the America. The ripple effect appeared to hit services globally, with the outage tracking website indicating outages with the corresponding services in multiple continents.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a platform that reports on internet outages, further indicated a surge in issues on that morning, including several cases located in the Virginia area, the location of the eastern US data center where the company stated the issues began.