Major disruption to online businesses is ongoing this morning, due to an outage in Amazon’s internet service AWS. Amazon supports a significant portion of the intrastructure of many major websites, which is why this outage is causing major disruption.
Snapchat and Duolingo are among the significant applications experiencing disruptions. Others include Canva, Roblox, Zoom, as well as the Government’s HMRC website.
A number of UK banks are also being impacted by the outage, including Barclays, Lloyds, and Halifax / Bank of Scotland.
As noted by the outage monitoring service Downdetector a short time ago, over 5,000 issues have reported by Snapchat users alone.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the cloud computing division of the retail behemoth Amazon. Its infrastructure underpins millions of large companies’ websites and platforms, with many smartphone apps also running on AWS data centres.
It has indicated on its status page that there are “heightened error rates and delays for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region.”
The company states that engineers are “actively involved and are currently working on both resolving the issue and thoroughly investigating the underlying cause” and that “We have identified a potential root cause for error rates for the DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region.”
“We are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.”
