Dozens of websites, banks and apps are being affected by a major internet outage. 

The problem, which started on Monday morning, appears to be related to an issue at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

As of 9.20am, there were more than 2,000 reports of the Amazon Web Services outage in the US alone, according to Downdetector, which monitors issues and outages in real-time.

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

Here’s what we know so far.

What has been affected?

Multiple banks, the UK’s Government Gateway services – which is accessed through the Gov.uk website, mobile phone networks and video-chatting platform Zoom are among the websites having technical issues.

All Amazon products – including Prime Video and Amazon Music – have also been affected, as well as the main Amazon website.

Here’s a full list of what has been affected by the internet outage, according to Downdetector:

• Amazon
• Amazon Alexa
• Amazon Music
• Amazon Prime Video
• Amazon Web Services
• Ancestry
• Asana
• Atlassian
• Bank Of Scotland
• Blink Security
• BT
• Canva
• Clash Of Clans
• Clash Royale
• Coinbase
• Dead By Daylight
• Duolingo
• EE
• Epic Games Store
• Eventbrite
• Flickr
• Fortnite
• Government Gateway services
• Halifax
• Hay Day
• HMRC
• IMDB
• Jira
• Life360
• Lloyds Bank
• Microsoft Store
• My Fitness Pal
• Peloton
• Perplexity AI
• Playstation Network
• Pokemon Go
• Ring
• Roblox
• Rocket League
• Signal
• Sky Mobile
• Slack
• Smartsheet
• Snapchat
• Strava
• Square
• Tidal
• WhatsApp
• Wordle
• Xero
• Zoom

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Pic: PA

Pic: PA
Image:
Pic: PA

What has AWS said?

AWS confirmed it was suffering from “increased error rates and latencies” for multiple services.

In a statement on its website, the company said: “We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause,” an update on its website says.

What is Amazon Web Services?

Mickey Carroll

Science and technology reporter

Amazon Web Services was named as the cause of the problem by the chief executive of AI company Perplexity.

Aravind Srinivas posted on X saying: “Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.”

AWS describes itself as “the world’s most comprehensive” cloud service.

It offers companies a virtual backbone, giving them access to servers, databases and storage without having to build their own infrastructure.

Millions of businesses are thought to use AWS, so when something goes wrong, it can have a huge impact. AWS hasn’t put out any information on the outage. Sky News has contacted the company for comment.

“We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share.”

The company is posting regular updates on the situation and said its engineers were “immediately engaged” as soon as they spotted the issue.

Concentrated in the US

ThousandEyes, a website that tracks the performance of local and wide area networks, servers and applications, shows many of the outages appear to be concentrated in the US.

A large portion is focused in Virginia, which is widely considered as the global capital for data centres.

Pic: PA
Image:
Pic: PA

Has something like this happened before?

Last year, CrowdStrike accidentally brought parts of the world to a standstill when the update introduced a bug.

Although it took just 78 minutes for the company to identify the problem and start rolling out a fix, the impact of the outage lasted far longer.

The company has now been sued by its own shareholders as well as Delta Airlines after it cancelled thousands of flights because of the shutdown.

In the UK, the CrowdStrike outage left GPs unable to access systems that manage appointments or allow them to view patient records or even send prescriptions to pharmacies.

Flights were cancelled or delayed and passengers were left stranded as airline systems were knocked offline or staff were forced to handwrite boarding passes and luggage tags.