Significant Internet Disruption Hits Numerous Websites and Mobile Apps

A widespread internet failure has impacted many websites and mobile apps around the world, as users experiencing issues accessing the internet due to difficulties at Amazon’s web hosting platform.

The affected apps include Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and Duolingo, along with a host of Amazon-operated operations such as its main retail site and the Ring device manufacturer.

Throughout Britain, Lloyds bank was disrupted along with its affiliates Halifax and the Scottish bank, while there were further notifications of problems reaching the HM Revenue and Customs website on the start of the week. Also in the UK, many Ring device owners turned to social media to complain their doorbells were not working.

In the UK alone, accounts of disruptions on specific apps ran into the tens of thousands for each platform.

Officials confirmed that the issue originated in the Atlantic coast of the America at Amazon Web Services, a unit that provides crucial web framework for a host of companies, who rent out capacity on the company's servers. AWS is the biggest global cloud computing service.

Just after late night (PDT) in the America (morning UK time), Amazon confirmed “elevated problem frequencies and latencies” for AWS services in a area on the east coast of the United States. The ripple effect was seen to affect apps worldwide, with the Downdetector site reporting problems with the identical platforms in various regions.

The outage tracker Thousand Eyes, a tool that monitors web disruptions, also reported a rise in problems on Monday morning, with many of them situated in the Virginia area, the location of the eastern US data center where AWS said the problems originated.