Substantial Internet Disruption Affects Many Online Platforms and Applications

A widespread internet failure has impacted numerous websites and apps worldwide, and users noting troubles connecting to the web due to difficulties at the online infrastructure platform.

The impacted apps comprise Snapchat, the gaming platform Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and Duolingo, along with several Amazon-managed services like its key e-commerce site and the Ring doorbell company.

Across the United Kingdom, Lloyds bank was disrupted along with its affiliates the bank Halifax and Bank of Scotland, with additional accounts of problems using the HM Revenue and Customs website on the start of the week. Also in the UK, several Ring device owners turned to social media to state their doorbells were not working.

Solely in the United Kingdom, reports of issues on individual platforms reached the tens of thousands for each app.

Officials confirmed that the issue originated in the Atlantic coast of the United States at the cloud division, a division that offers vital web backbone for a host of companies, who rent out capacity on the company's servers. The cloud platform is the world’s largest cloud computing platform.

Soon after midnight (PDT) in the America (morning UK time), Amazon confirmed “increased error rates and delays” for the cloud services in a region on the Atlantic seaboard of the America. The ripple effect seemed to affect services around the world, and the outage tracking website indicating issues with the corresponding services in multiple continents.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a tool that monitors internet outages, also reported a surge in outages on Monday morning, with many of them found in the state of Virginia, the location of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where AWS said the problems originated.