Many of the world’s biggest apps and websites have suddenly stopped working properly.
Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo and Canva were all suffering problems, according to tracking website Down Detector.
The issues began around 8am in the UK, or midnight pacific time.
The problems appear to be related to an issue at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which offers infrastructure that underpins much of the modern internet.
The company was seeing “increased error rates” and delays with “multiple AWS services”, it said on its service status page.
Amazon Web Services provides a host of internet infrastructure services that allow companies to hire computers and servers to run their apps and websites. As such, any problems at AWS can quickly affect much of the rest of the internet, bringing down websites that might have no apparent connection to Amazon itself.
It is now the most popular provider of such cloud services in the world. It made $108 billion last year, and it now accounts for the majority of Amazon’s profits.
Amazon internet outage: Key points
- Snapchat, Wordle, HMRC: Which sites are down?
- Amazon says it is experiencing problems
- What is Amazon Web Services?
- Downdetector suddenly turns red
Amazon Web Services says it is still looking for the cause of the problems
09:44
,
Andrew Griffin
The outage has now been going on for more than 90 minutes. Amazon has posted a range of updates to its status page, but they make clear that it’s still not entirely clear what the problem is.
“Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause,” the latest update reads.
What is Amazon Web Services?
09:42
,
Andrew Griffin
Amazon Web Services might be described as the biggest thing on the internet that you’ve never heard of. (But that might not be true, because actually it’s been growing in prominence, and Amazon itself is spending money on advertising it, among other things. Still, it’s a nice line that’s not entirely untrue either.)
AWS powers the internet, offering cloud services and other web infrastructure to companies. It is not alone in doing that – it competes with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, most notably – but it is the biggest in the industry.
It means in short that a company can rent computers, servers and other technologies from Amazon. For the companies, that means access to the infrastructure required to show apps to people without having to build their own data centres; for Amazon, it benefits from economies of scale that allow it to build massive data centres and share out those computing resources as and when they are needed.
AWS officially launched in 2006, though its roots go further back than that. In the 20 years since it has grown rapidly, and now powers much of the internet and is responsible for most of Amazon’s profits.
Problems present everywhere
09:37
,
Andrew Griffin
The issue at Amazon Web Services appears to be related to a specific facility in northern Virginia. But the problems are affecting users around the world – tracking website Down Detector shows reports from just about everywhere, across the various affected apps.
08:47
,
Andrew Griffin
Here’s a big list of everything that is showing as having problems on Down Detector. It includes everything from online games (Clash Royale and Roblox) to the UK’s tax authority:
Snapchat, Ring, Roblox, Clash Royale, Life360, My Fitness Pal, Xero, Canva, Amazon, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Music, Prime Video, Clash of Clans, Fortnite, Wordle, Duolingo, Coinbase, HMRC, Vodafone, Playstation, Pokémon Go.
Amazon says it is experiencing problems
08:41
,
Andrew Griffin
An update has been posted on Amazon’s service status website, which makes clear that it is experiencing problems at its facilities in north Virginia. The issues are affecting Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud, both of which allow companies to rent storage and computers to run their services.
Downdetector suddenly turns red
08:38
,
Andrew Griffin
Downdetector, a website that tracks complaints about websites and web services not working, shows the sudden and widespread nature of the outage.
Hello and welcome...
08:34
,
Andrew Griffin
... to The Independent’s live coverage of an ongoing internet outage that has taken down much of the internet.