Internet outages reported after Amazon Web Services disruption

Other services showing a spike in reported outages included Snapchat, Slack, Ring, Vodafone, Signal, Virgin Media, BT, EE and Sky.

Reported outages on Downdetector appeared to spike between 9am and 10am for most services, and then decline through Monday morning, with AWS stating at 10.27am it had seen “significant signs of recovery”.

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.

Technical problems

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 service health update by AWS posted at 10.01am stated the company had identified a potential root cause, adding: “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.”

A further update at 11.03am stated: “We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS services.

“We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered

Recovery

A further 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.

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.