Substantial Web Disruption Impacts Numerous Websites and Applications

A large-scale web failure has impacted dozens online platforms and apps worldwide, and users experiencing issues accessing the internet following issues at the web hosting system.

The disrupted platforms include Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, along with multiple Amazon-managed services like its key e-commerce platform and the Ring device manufacturer.

In the UK, Lloyds bank was affected in addition to its subsidiaries Halifax and the Scottish bank, and also reports of difficulties using the HMRC site on that morning. Furthermore across the UK, several Ring customers turned to social media to state their doorbells were not working.

In the UK alone, reports of issues on particular applications ran into the many thousands for each app.

The company stated that the outage began in the east coast of the US at AWS, a unit that supplies essential web framework for many firms, who rent out resources on Amazon servers. AWS is the world’s largest cloud computing platform.

Just after the start of the day (PDT) in the United States (morning UK time), Amazon confirmed “higher failure rates and delays” for AWS services in a area on the east coast of the United States. The widespread consequence appeared to hit apps worldwide, and the problem monitoring service indicating outages with the corresponding services in multiple continents.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a platform that reports on online failures, also reported a surge in outages on the start of the week, and numerous instances located in the state of Virginia, the region of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where AWS said the problems began.