Major Online Disruption Affects Many Sites and Applications

A widespread web disruption has affected dozens websites and applications around the world, and users experiencing problems getting online following issues at Amazon’s web hosting system.

The disrupted apps include Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and Duolingo, in addition to multiple Amazon-owned platforms such as its primary shopping website and the Ring doorbell home security firm.

Throughout Britain, the financial institution Lloyds was disrupted as well as its affiliates the bank Halifax and the Scottish bank, and also reports of difficulties reaching the the tax authority site on the start of the week. Furthermore across the UK, multiple Ring device owners turned to networks to state their doorbells were malfunctioning.

In the UK alone, notifications of disruptions on individual applications totaled the tens of thousands for each platform.

The company stated that the problem began in the east coast of the US at Amazon Web Services, a section that provides crucial online infrastructure for many companies, who utilize capacity on AWS infrastructure. The cloud platform is the biggest global cloud computing platform.

Just after midnight (PDT) in the America (8 in the morning BST), the company announced “elevated failure rates and latencies” for the cloud services in a region on the eastern US of the America. The cascading impact appeared to hit services globally, and the outage tracking website reporting problems with the same sites in multiple continents.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a platform that tracks online failures, also reported a surge in outages on Monday morning, with many of them found in Virginia, the site of the AWS US-East-1 zone where the company stated the outage began.