A widespread internet disruption has left millions of users unable to access numerous popular websites and applications after Amazon Web Services experienced a major technical failure.
The outage has impacted essential banking services, social media platforms and entertainment sites across the United States and United Kingdom.
The disruption began shortly after 8am BST, affecting services including Snapchat, Fortnite and Duolingo.
Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing platform that provides the infrastructure for countless websites, is at the center of the problem.
DownDetector recorded more than 6,000 reports from affected customers in the United States.
An additional 1,600 users in the United Kingdom reported problems accessing various online services.
Amazon’s own platforms have not been spared from the technical difficulties.
Amazon.com, Amazon Alexa, Ring and Amazon Prime Video all experienced disruptions during the outage.
The technical issues appear to originate from Amazon’s data center facility in North Virginia, known as us-east-1.
This location serves as a critical hub for global internet infrastructure.
75 percent of reported problems stem from the us-east-1 region, according to DownDetector data.
The remaining reports come from two other United States locations.
Major British financial institutions have been significantly affected by the outage.
Lloyds and Halifax banking applications became inaccessible to customers during the disruption.
Professor James Davenport from the University of Bath expressed concern about UK banking apps relying on services running from the US-EAST-1 region.
He stated that UK banks should confine their usage to UK or European regions.
“UK banks should be confining their usage to UK, or at least European regions, but it might be that they rely on some service that actually runs out of US-EAST-1,” Davenport said, according to Daily Mail reporting.
The professor noted potential implications for customer data handling.
“Obviously this is causing an impact now, but it might mean that some customer data is being handled in the U.S. or possibly that customer usage patterns, even if not actual banking data, can be inferred. We don’t know,” he explained.
Government services have also experienced disruptions.
GOV.UK, the platform used for visa applications, passport renewals and tax management, became unavailable to users.
Jake Moore, a technology expert and security advisor at ESET, suggested the outage likely resulted from an internal error at Amazon. However, he acknowledged that a cyberattack cannot be completely ruled out at this stage.
“While a cyberattack can’t be ruled out until AWS releases its full post-incident report, there’s no current evidence of hacking, data breaches or coordinated attacks,” Moore told the Daily Mail.
Amazon Web Services acknowledged the problem on its AWS Health Dashboard page. The company stated that an “operational issue” was affecting “multiple services.”
“Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause,” AWS stated.
Moore described the error as causing a “cascading failure where one system’s slowdown disrupted others” across the platform.
He emphasized the dependency on fragile infrastructures with limited backup plans.
AWS controls approximately 30 percent of the global cloud infrastructure market.
This substantial market share means disruptions can have significant worldwide impact.
“Because so many global apps and websites rely so heavily on AWS for cloud hosting and data processing, the disruption rapidly becomes widespread and creates a knock on effect to many services,” Moore explained.
