Some of the world’s most popular apps – Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Canva, and Duolingo – are all facing technical issues as thousands report outages across the UK.

Outages began this morning at around 8am, and are ongoing as of publication.

The issues are linked to an Amazon Web Services problem – the firm’s cloud operations serve as the foundational tech for many large organisations and provide integral functioning and data storage.

AWS’s service status page said that the cloud services provider has faced “increased error rates” across many of its services. According to DownDetector, users began reporting issues with the service just before 8am today, with outage reporting ongoing.

Since this morning, AWS has issued a few new updates as more and more sites reported issues. Reddit, one of the most visited platforms on the internet, faced increasing issues, and users reported issues trying to access the EA app. About a thousand websites faced delays and disruptions due to the issues.

While AWS reported on its service status page that it was making progress resolving the issue, and some firms like affected banks are now getting back online, the latest update shows that a full recover has still yet to be achieved.

After applying multiple mitigations across its affected cloud regions, AWS reported that it was facing “significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services in the US-East- 1 region.

Later, at 3:29 am AWS said that it “confirmed multiple AWS services experienced network connectivity issues in the US-EAST-1 Region. We are seeing early signs of recovery for the connectivity issues and are continuing to investigate the root cause.”

The issues caused some disruption to NHS services and the HMRC as well as the National Rail website were both affected.

The major disruption, which is centralised to data centres in the US, points to several issues surrounding the centralisation of the internet, as well as the continued push for data sovereignty for European nations.

“This incident underlines our growing dependency on a small number of global cloud providers and how cloud is not always as resilient as we expect it to be. When key services rely on the availability of individual regions, any single-point failure can have far-reaching consequences,” Rob Demain, CEO at e2e-assure said.

Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, an AI company also facing outages, posted on X saying that “The root cause is an AWS issue.”

The issues have also affected Ring, an security doorbell company which allows users to monitor their house via installed doorbell cameras.

Banks, including Lloyds, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland, have also seen large reports of issues.

While outages are taking place across the UK, most of the reported issues with the many affected websites and with AWS are concentrated in the US, particularly in the state of Virginia, which has a high concentration of data centres. It’s 640 data centres make the state the largest data centre market in the world.

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Amazon confirmed that it was “actively engaged and working both to mitigate the issue and understand root cause,” on its service status page.

Another update says that it has confirmed “significant error rates” affecting some of its AWS services. Its Amazon DynamoDB service was described as disrupted, while 37 services are current impacted by the issue.

“During this time, customers may be unable to create or update Support Cases.”

Amazon says it will continue to provide updates to users.

So far websites and apps affected include: AWS, Snapchat, Roblox, Canva, HMRC, Duolingo, Fortnite, Ring, Clash Royale, Life360, My Fitness pal, Xero, Amazon, Prime Video, Wordle, Coinbase, Vodafone, Playstation, Pokémon Go, and Amazon Music.