Major Internet Disruption Affects Many Sites and Mobile Apps

A large-scale internet disruption has disrupted dozens sites and applications worldwide, as users noting issues connecting to the web due to difficulties at Amazon’s web hosting system.

The disrupted services include Snapchat, Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and Duolingo, along with multiple Amazon-owned operations such as its key e-commerce website and the Ring security device manufacturer.

In the UK, the financial institution Lloyds was disrupted along with its branches Halifax and the Scottish bank, with further notifications of problems accessing the HM Revenue and Customs website on that morning. Additionally in Britain, several Ring users took to online platforms to state their home gadgets were malfunctioning.

Solely in the United Kingdom, accounts of issues on particular apps totaled the tens of thousands for each platform.

The company stated that the problem began in the Atlantic coast of the United States at Amazon Web Services, a unit that supplies crucial internet infrastructure for many firms, who utilize resources on Amazon servers. The cloud platform is the biggest global online services system.

Soon after midnight (PDT) in the US (morning UK time), the company announced “elevated problem frequencies and delays” for AWS services in a zone on the east coast of the United States. The widespread consequence was seen to affect apps around the world, and the outage tracking website reporting problems with the corresponding services in multiple continents.

The outage tracker Thousand Eyes, a tool that reports on internet outages, also reported a surge in problems on that morning, with many of them found in Virginia, the region of the AWS US-East-1 zone where the company stated the issues started.