Widespread Internet Outage Hits Sites Using Amazon Web Services

Internet users across the globe suffered disruption as a result of a widespread outage that hit dozens of major websites and apps using Amazon Web Services.

Sites including Facebook, Snapchat, Amazon and Roblox appeared to be down early Monday, with financial services Coinbase, Robinhood and Venmo also reporting disruptions.

The AWS infrastructure underpins millions of websites and platforms, providing cloud-computing services such as servers, computing power and storage to the world’s biggest companies. Any problems with the AWS network can have a major impact on the wider internet. Many of the popular mobile apps also rely on AWS systems.

"We are investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region,” AWS said on its website. The US-EAST-1 Region refers to a group of data centers on the eastern seaboard of the U.S., centered around Northern Virginia. Engineers were "engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause,” the company added.

The company said the issues stem from problems with the Amazon DynamoDB system, which provides websites with database storage and computing power.

Users began reporting problems starting around 3 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks service disruptions.