Major Web Disruption Impacts Numerous Sites and Mobile Apps

A large-scale online outage has impacted numerous websites and mobile apps around the world, as users experiencing troubles connecting to the web due to difficulties at the online infrastructure service.

The disrupted apps encompass the social media app Snapchat, Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, in addition to several Amazon-owned operations including its primary shopping platform and the Ring doorbell company.

Across the United Kingdom, Lloyds bank was impacted as well as its branches the bank Halifax and the Scottish bank, and further notifications of problems accessing the HM Revenue and Customs online portal on that morning. Also in the UK, many Ring users used online platforms to state their security devices were not working.

Just within Britain, accounts of problems on particular apps reached the tens of thousands for each app.

The company stated that the issue began in the Atlantic coast of the United States at AWS, a unit that supplies crucial web backbone for numerous firms, who lease space on the company's servers. Amazon Web Services is the biggest global cloud computing system.

Shortly after the start of the day (PDT) in the United States (8am BST), the company announced “increased error rates and slowdowns” for the cloud services in a region on the eastern US of the America. The ripple effect seemed to affect services around the world, and the outage tracking website showing problems with the corresponding services in various regions.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a tool that monitors web disruptions, also reported a surge in problems on the start of the week, and numerous instances found in Virginia, the region of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where officials confirmed the outage began.