Lloyds Bank and Snapchat were among the dozens of websites and apps that were knocked offline after a crash involving hosting company Amazon Web Services.
The problem started on Monday morning when millions of web users found they were unable to access services including the Ring doorbell app, Fortnite and Amazon’s own Prime Video.
The blackout even affected the Government’s Gateway login service, which includes HMRC and many other public services.
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The Telegraph reports: Trying to log into HMRC or other government services led to the message: “Sorry, there is a problem with the service. Try again later.”
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The Lloyds website said: “Sorry, we’re unable to process your request at the moment. We are currently having some technical issues.” It told customers to call the company’s helpline if they needed support. Users also reported problems with Halifax’s banking app.
The problem was linked to Amazon Web Services, the giant cloud computing division run by Amazon, which thousands of websites rely on.
AWS said late on Monday morning that the issue was being resolved and that many services were coming back online.
“We have applied initial mitigations and we are observing early signs of recovery for some impacted AWS services. During this time, requests may continue to fail as we work toward full resolution,” it said.
The issue appeared to be related to a database system websites rely on to access their data stored in Amazon’s data centres.
It said: “Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue.”
More than 80 different AWS features had been affected.
Amazon’s own services including smart assistant Alexa and Prime Video also appeared to have issues.
