Significant Online Failure Impacts Dozens Sites and Applications

An extensive internet disruption has disrupted dozens websites and applications worldwide, and users noting troubles connecting to the web due to difficulties at the web hosting system.

The disrupted apps encompass Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, and Duolingo, as well as several Amazon-owned platforms including its main retail website and the Ring doorbell device manufacturer.

In the UK, the financial institution Lloyds was impacted in addition to its affiliates Halifax and Bank of Scotland, and additional accounts of difficulties accessing the HM Revenue and Customs website on that morning. Also in the UK, many Ring customers turned to social media to state their doorbells were not working.

In the UK alone, accounts of disruptions on particular applications reached the thousands for each app.

Amazon reported that the outage began in the Atlantic coast of the US at AWS, a unit that supplies crucial web backbone for a host of businesses, who utilize space on AWS infrastructure. AWS is the biggest global cloud computing service.

Soon after the start of the day (PDT) in the US (8 in the morning BST), Amazon confirmed “increased error rates and delays” for the cloud services in a region on the Atlantic seaboard of the US. The widespread consequence seemed to disrupt platforms around the world, with the problem monitoring service reporting outages with the same sites in multiple continents.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a tool that reports on internet outages, further indicated a increase in outages on the start of the week, including several cases found in the state of Virginia, the location of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where officials confirmed the issues originated.