Major internet outage hits dozens of websites and apps

(Sharecast News) - A raft of popular websites and apps have gone down, from Halifax to Snapchat and Ring doorbells, after reported issues at Amazon Web Services led to a major internet outage on Monday. According to Downdetector - a website which allows people to report outages - some of the world's biggest brands and organisations have been affected.

As well as Halifax, Snapchat and Ring, they include Amazon, Lloyds Banking Group, HM Revenue & Customs, Zoom, Vodafone, Life360, Fortnight and Coinbase, among others.

In a statement on its website, Downdetector noted: "User reports issue at AWS in the US-East-1 region. These problems are impacting multiple services that depend on AWS infrastructure."

In a statement, Amazon's cloud division said: "We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiples AWS services in the US-East-1 region. This issue may also be affecting case creation through the AWS support centre or the support API.

"We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understood the root cause."

US-East-1 region refers to its data centre in North Virginia.

Companies use AWS's cloud infrastructure to run their websites, apps and other platforms. It is one of Amazon's most important, and profitable, divisions.

Aravind Srinivas, chief executive of AI company Perplexity, posted on social media: "Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We're working on resolving it."

Other companies that do not use AWS appeared unaffected as at 1030 BST, including Google, which uses its own cloud service, Facebook-owner Meta and Elon Musk's X.