Substantial Online Disruption Hits Numerous Sites and Applications

An extensive online failure has impacted numerous online platforms and mobile apps worldwide, with users noting problems connecting to the web following issues at the web hosting system.

The affected apps include the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and Duolingo, in addition to a host of Amazon-managed services including its primary shopping website and the Ring home security firm.

In the UK, Lloyds bank was impacted as well as its affiliates Halifax and the Scottish bank, while there were additional accounts of problems reaching the HM Revenue and Customs site on the start of the week. Furthermore across the UK, many Ring device owners used networks to state their home gadgets were failing.

In the UK alone, notifications of disruptions on particular apps reached the thousands for each platform.

The company stated that the problem originated in the Atlantic coast of the US at Amazon Web Services, a unit that provides crucial internet infrastructure for numerous businesses, who utilize resources on Amazon servers. Amazon Web Services is the world’s largest web hosting platform.

Just after the start of the day (PDT) in the US (8 in the morning BST), officials reported “higher problem frequencies and latencies” for Amazon's platforms in a zone on the Atlantic seaboard of the America. The cascading impact was seen to hit platforms around the world, and the Downdetector site reporting issues with the identical platforms in multiple continents.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a service that reports on online failures, further indicated a rise in problems on Monday morning, with many of them situated in the state of Virginia, the region of the eastern US data center where officials confirmed the outage originated.