Amazon services 'recovering' as Snapchat and banks among sites hit by outage

Amazon services 'recovering' as Snapchat and banks among sites hit by outage 48 minutes ago Share Save Liv McMahon Technology reporter Share Save Getty Images Many of the world's largest websites, including Snapchat, Reddit and Roblox, were knocked offline on Monday after a huge Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage. More than 1,000 apps and websites - including banks such as Lloyds and Halifax - were impacted by problems at the heart of the cloud computing giant's operations in the US, according to platform outage monitor Downdetector. It said reports from users of problems globally had soared to more than 6.5 million during the outage on Monday morning. While Amazon said it had resolved the outage by 12:00 BST, experts say it demonstrates the perils that come with lots of companies relying on a single, dominant provider. "What this episode has highlighted is just how interdependent our infrastructure is," said Prof Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey. "So many online services rely upon third parties for their physical infrastructure, and this shows that problems can occur in even the largest of those third-party providers. "Small errors, often human made, can have widespread and significant impact." The issues appear to have begun at around 07:00 BST on Monday, as users began to report problems accessing a slew of platforms. This included a wide range of different sites and services, from massive online games like Fortnite to the language-learning app Duolingo. Downdetector told the BBC it had seen more than four million reports from users across 500 sites within just a few hours - more than double the amount it would see across an entire regular weekday. These later peaked at more than six million, it said, as more services including Reddit and Lloyds Bank attempted to recover. At around 11:00 BST, Amazon said most of its affected services had recovered. What went wrong?