Major Online Outage Impacts Dozens Sites and Apps

An extensive online outage has impacted dozens online platforms and apps globally, and users noting troubles connecting to the web due to difficulties at the cloud computing service.

The affected platforms encompass the social media app Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, as well as multiple Amazon-operated operations like its main retail site and the Ring security doorbell company.

Across the United Kingdom, the financial institution Lloyds was affected along with its branches Halifax and the Scottish bank, and further notifications of problems accessing the HM Revenue and Customs website on Monday morning. Also in the UK, several Ring customers used online platforms to state their security devices were malfunctioning.

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

Officials confirmed that the problem originated in the Atlantic coast of the US at the cloud division, a division that offers essential web framework for numerous companies, who lease capacity on the company's servers. Amazon Web Services is the world’s largest online services service.

Shortly after the start of the day (PDT) in the US (8am BST), the company announced “elevated error rates and delays” for AWS services in a zone on the eastern US of the United States. The widespread consequence was seen to affect apps worldwide, and the Downdetector site showing issues with the corresponding services in different parts of the world.

The monitoring service Thousand Eyes, a platform that monitors online failures, additionally noted a increase in outages on that morning, including several cases located in Virginia, the site of the AWS US-East-1 zone where AWS said the issues began.