Major Online Outage Affects Many Sites and Applications

A widespread online outage has affected many online platforms and applications worldwide, as users experiencing troubles getting online due to difficulties at the cloud computing system.

The disrupted apps include the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, Signal, and Duolingo, along with several Amazon-managed platforms including its key e-commerce platform and the Ring home security firm.

In the UK, the financial institution Lloyds was impacted along with its affiliates Halifax and Bank of Scotland, while there were additional accounts of issues accessing the HM Revenue and Customs site on Monday morning. Also in the UK, multiple Ring customers took to social media to complain their doorbells were malfunctioning.

Just within Britain, notifications of issues on individual platforms totaled the thousands for each app.

The company stated that the issue started in the Atlantic coast of the United States at the cloud division, a division that offers vital online backbone for many companies, who utilize capacity on AWS infrastructure. Amazon Web Services is the most extensive online services system.

Soon after late night (PDT) in the United States (8am BST), the company announced “elevated problem frequencies and slowdowns” for Amazon's platforms in a region on the east coast of the United States. The cascading impact seemed to hit apps globally, with the problem monitoring service showing issues with the same sites in different parts of the world.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a service that monitors internet outages, further indicated a surge in problems on that morning, and numerous instances situated in the Virginia area, the region of the eastern US data center where the company stated the outage started.