Major Web Outage Hits Dozens Online Platforms and Apps

A widespread web outage has impacted dozens online platforms and mobile apps around the world, and users experiencing issues getting online after problems at the web hosting platform.

The disrupted platforms encompass the social media app Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and the language learning app Duolingo, as well as a host of Amazon-owned services including its key e-commerce website and the Ring home security firm.

Across the United Kingdom, the financial institution Lloyds was affected in addition to its branches the bank Halifax and the Scottish bank, while there were further notifications of difficulties reaching the HM Revenue and Customs website on that morning. Furthermore across the UK, many Ring users used social media to state their doorbells were failing.

In the UK alone, notifications of issues on specific applications ran into the tens of thousands for each app.

The company stated that the problem started in the eastern region of the America at the cloud division, a division that offers essential web infrastructure for a host of businesses, who rent out resources on AWS infrastructure. AWS is the most extensive web hosting service.

Soon after late night (PDT) in the United States (8 in the morning BST), Amazon confirmed “elevated failure rates and slowdowns” for the cloud services in a region on the eastern US of the America. The ripple effect was seen to affect platforms worldwide, and the outage tracking website reporting outages with the identical platforms in different parts of the world.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a tool that reports on web disruptions, additionally noted a surge in issues on that morning, and numerous instances found in the Virginia area, the region of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where AWS said the issues originated.