Substantial Online Outage Hits Dozens Websites and Apps

A large-scale internet disruption has affected numerous online platforms and applications worldwide, with users experiencing problems getting online following issues at the web hosting platform.

The disrupted platforms encompass the social media app Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, and Duolingo, as well as several Amazon-owned platforms like its primary shopping website and the Ring doorbell home security firm.

In the UK, the financial institution Lloyds was affected along with its subsidiaries Halifax and the Scottish bank, with further notifications of difficulties accessing the HM Revenue and Customs site on the start of the week. Also in the UK, multiple Ring users used networks to report their security devices were not working.

In the UK alone, notifications of problems on individual apps totaled the many thousands for every service.

Amazon reported that the problem began in the eastern region of the United States at the cloud division, a unit that supplies essential internet backbone for many businesses, who rent out capacity on AWS infrastructure. AWS is the biggest global cloud computing platform.

Soon after midnight (PDT) in the America (8am BST), the company announced “elevated error rates and slowdowns” for the cloud services in a area on the Atlantic seaboard of the United States. The widespread consequence was seen to affect apps around the world, and the Downdetector site reporting problems with the same sites in multiple continents.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a platform that tracks web disruptions, also reported a rise in problems on the start of the week, with many of them located in the state of Virginia, the location of the eastern US data center where the company stated the outage originated.