Thousands of users around the world have experienced problems accessing popular websites and applications. The cause was probably a malfunction of Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud service.
Among the victims are Snapchat, Duolingo, Roblox, Zoom, Fortnite, Canva, Wordle, Signal, Slack, MyFitnessPal, Clash of Clans, Pokemon Go, Epic Games, PlayStation Network, Peloton and many others.
The Signal malfunction is particularly painful for Ukraine, as this messenger is actively used by the Ukrainian military.
Even the website of the British tax office HMRC temporarily stopped working, giving an error when trying to log in.
Amazon Web Services said that engineers are already working on fixing the problem and finding out what caused it.
Later in an update, Amazon said the problem was “clearly related to DNS resolution for the DynamoDB API endpoint in the US – EAST-1 region” (North) or computers. This process underpins the entire internet, and any glitches could result in web browsers being unable to find the content users are looking for.
The company said there are now “significant signs of recovery” and most requests should be successful. At 3:03 a.m. Pacific Standard Time (10:03 a.m. GMT), the company announced that most services had been restored.
“We can confirm that global services and features specific to the US – EAST-1 region have also been restored,” the company said.
What AWS is and why the outage affected so many services
Amazon Web Services is Amazon’s cloud division, whose infrastructure supports millions of websites and platforms for large companies.
Many popular apps on users’ smartphones are linked to these failures directly to AWS, or are separate in nature. The BBC has reached out to Lloyds for comment.
The scale of the problem
Monitoring platform Downdetector recorded a spike in user complaints, with Snapchat alone receiving more than 5,000 reports of problems.
Users have also reported problems with Roblox, Duolingo and many other popular services.
The BBC has reached out to Snapchat and Amazon for comment. Users experiencing problems are advised to be patient and follow updates on the services’ and companies’ pages.
Amazon Web Services says it is actively working to mitigate the outage and fully understands its causes.