Major internet outage due to Amazon Web Services affecting Snapchat, Lloyds bank, Ring doorbell, Canva and more - when will services return?

Internet users have flooded DownDetector with reports of major apps being down including Snapchat, Lloyds Bank, Ring doorbell, Canva, HMRC - and many more.

The issues began at around 8am this morning - a week after Vodafone suffered outage last Monday.

Today’s internet outage is reportedly related to an issue at Amazon Web Services (AWS) which offers infrastructure that underpins much of the internet.

The company was seeing “increased error rates” and delays with “multiple AWS services”, it said on its service status page.

According to Downdetector, there are more than 2,000 reports of the Amazon Web Services outage in the US alone.

There were 500 reports of issues for the HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) website by 9am. Other services showing a spike in reported outages included Snapchat, Slack, Ring, Vodafone, Signal, Virgin Media, BT, EE and Sky.

On its service status page, the company said it was seeing "increased error rates" and delays with "multiple AWS services". Amazon Web Services has issued a statement on its website, confirming "increased error rates and latencies" for multiple services.

There is currently no advice on when services will fully return to normal. But some services were starting to return by 10:57am.  An update posted by at AWS 10.27am stated: “We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests.” 

The update added that its Amazon DynamoDB database service had been “degraded” and 65 other services had been “impacted” including Amazon CloudFront, AWS Config and AWS Security Token Service.

AWS added at 11.35am that the “underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated”.

Customers have also reported an increase in outage reports at UK banks including Lloyds, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland – with 6,925 Downdetector outage reports at Lloyds at 9.31am.

An error message posted on Halifax’s website read: “Sorry, we’re unable to process your request at the moment. We’re currently having some technical problems.”

An HMRC spokesperson said: “We’re aware that customers are having problems accessing our online services, as part of global issues affecting Amazon Web Services. We’re working urgently with them on this matter.

“Our phonelines are currently busy as a result, so for anything that isn’t urgent we recommend calling at a later time.”

A Lloyds Bank spokesperson said: “Issues with Amazon Web Services are affecting some of our services right now.

“We’re sorry about this and ask customers to bear with us while we work to bring all our services back online as soon as possible.”

A spokesperson for VodafoneThree said: “Vodafone and Three networks are operating normally.

“Some customers may have difficulty accessing certain apps and websites due to a wider issue with Amazon Web Services (AWS). This is unrelated to our mobile networks. We are continuing to monitor the situation.”

AWS is the world’s largest cloud computing provider and offers a wide variety of services, including storage, databases, machine learning, and security tools.

AWS provides cloud computing services to individuals, universities, governments and companies worldwide, such as servers, storage, networking, remote computing, email, mobile development and security. When AWS goes down, so do other websites that use its services, which is an embarrassing blow to the Amazon-owned platform – as these companies, universities, individuals and governments pay to use the services.

According to Dataconomy, the issue appears to stem from problems at Amazon’s massive data center facilities in North Virginia, a critical hub for the global internet. It is currently unclear what the cause of the outage is.

Customers have also reported an increase in outage reports at UK banks including Lloyds, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland – with 6,925 Downdetector outage reports at Lloyds at 9.31am. 

A service health update by AWS posted at 10.01am stated: “We have identified a potential root cause for error rates for the DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region.

“Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1.

“We are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery. This issue also affects other AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region.

“Global services or features that rely on US-EAST-1 endpoints such as IAM updates and DynamoDB Global tables may also be experiencing issues.

“During this time, customers may be unable to create or update support cases. We recommend customers continue to retry any failed requests.”

The update said its Amazon DynamoDB database service had been “disrupted” and 40 other services had been “impacted” including Amazon CloudFront, AWS Config and AWS Security Token Service.

AWS is the world’s largest cloud computing provider and offers a wide variety of services, including storage, databases, machine learning, and security tools.