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.
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 and includes things like HMRC, universal credit and pensions – mobile phone networks and video-chatting platform Zoom are among the websites reportedly having technical issues.
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 phone lines are currently busy as a result, so for anything that isn’t urgent we recommend calling at a later time.”
All Amazon products – including Prime Video, Alexa and Amazon Music – have also been affected, as well as the main Amazon website.
According to Downdetector, nearly 50 outlets have been affected. Here’s a full list:
• 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 (including HMRC)
• Halifax
• Hay Day
• Hinge
• HMRC
• IMDB
• Jira Software
• Just Eat
• Life360
• Lloyds Bank
• Microsoft 365
• 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
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.
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.
What to do if you are affected
Sky News’ science and technology reporter Mickey Carroll says those affected by the outage are partly at the mercy of AWS to get their services back up and running.
But in the meantime, Hayley Andrews Smith, an automations specialist working at Myriad, advised people on LinkedIn to check their business’s automated processes as “anything hosted on AWS might be affected”.
She also suggested pausing critical workflows until the systems are back up.
Carroll says people should also keep their guard up for scammers.
Has something like this happened before?
In July last year, American cybersecurity company CrowdStrike accidentally brought parts of the world to a standstill when a faulty software update caused a global IT outage.
It took just 78 minutes for the company to identify the problem and start rolling out a fix, but the impact disrupted internet services, affecting 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices.
In the UK, the outage also left GPs unable to access systems that manage appointments or allow them to view patient records or even send prescriptions to pharmacies.
Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
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.
The company has now been sued by its own shareholders as well as Delta Airlines after it cancelled thousands of flights.
