'Half the internet' down as Amazon, Snapchat, and HMRC 'stop working'

Internet users have been left baffled this morning (20 October) after a number of major websites have stopped working.

Amazon, Canva, Duolingo, Roblox, HMRC, and Snapchat are among the dozens of websites currently reported as being down on the Downdetector website.

Thousands of websites and apps have been experiencing issues since around 8am UK time, with people all over the world taking to social media to complain about the outage.

Other sites and applications currently having issues include Clash Royale, Life360, My Fitness Pal, Xero, Amazon Music, Amazon Web Services, Prime Video, Clash of Clans, Fortnite, Wordle, Coinbase, Ring, PlayStation and Pokémon Go.

The source of the issue is related to Amazon Web Services, which provides infrastructure for much of the modern internet we use everyday, allowing companies to hire computers and servers to run their websites and apps.

This means any issues with Amazon Web Services' platform can affect hundreds, if not thousands of websites, without it having any impact on Amazon itself.

According to its service status page, the company was experiencing 'increased error rates' and delays with 'multiple AWS services,' with problems first becoming apparent around 8am UK time.

"We are investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region. We will provide another update in the next 30-45 minutes," the first update read.

The second, published around 40 minutes later added: "We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. This issue may also be affecting Case Creation through the AWS Support Center or the Support API.

"We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause. We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share."

A third update, made at 9.26am UK time, said: "We can confirm significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region. This issue also affects other AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region as well.

"During this time, customers may be unable to create or update Support Cases. Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause. We will continue to provide updates as we have more information to share, or by 2:00 AM (PDT)."

Amazon Web Services is currently the most popular provider in the world when it comes to cloud services, making an eye-watering $108 billion last year, accounting for the majority of Amazon's profits.

Confused internet users have taken to social media after waking up to discover that the majority of the most popular websites are currently unavailable.

"So the entire internet just went down basically?" one person wrote on X, while another added: "Wow AWS went down and took half the internet with it."

A third wrote: "Of all the things I could've expected today I was NOT expecting the whole internet to go down."

LADbible has reached out to Amazon Web Services for comment.