A major internet outage has hit dozens of websites and apps around the world, with users reporting troubles getting online after problems at Amazon’s cloud computing service.
The affected platforms include Snapchat, Roblox, Signal and Duolingo as well as a host of Amazon-owned operations including its main retail site and the Ring doorbell company.
In the UK, Lloyds bank was affected as well as its subsidiaries Halifax and Bank of Scotland, while there were also reports of problems accessing the HM Revenue and Customs website on Monday morning. Also in the UK, multiple Ring users took to social media to complaint their doorbells were not working.
In the UK alone reports of problems on individual apps ran into the tens of thousands for each platform.
Amazon reported that the problem originated in the east coast of the US at Amazon Web Services, a unit that provides vital web infrastructure for a host of companies, who rent out space on Amazon servers. AWS is the world’s largest cloud computing platform.
Just after midnight (PDT) in the US (8am BST) Amazon confirmed “increased error rates and latencies” for AWS services in a region on the east coast of the US. The ripple effect appeared to hit services around the world, with the Downdetector site reporting problems with the same sites in multiple continents.
Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a service that tracks internet outages, also reported a surge in problems on Monday morning, with many of them located in Virginia, the location of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where AWS said the problems began.
