
A major outage at Amazon Web Services has caused global chaos, leaving millions of users without access to apps like Snapchat, Fortnite, Duolingo, as well as banking services and Amazon's own platforms, including Alexa, Prime Video and Ring.
According to the website DownDetector, the problems began around 8am UK time, with thousands of reports from the US and UK. The main cause is thought to be a fault at Amazon's data centre in North Virginia, a critical node in the global internet infrastructure.
Cybersecurity experts say that so far there is no evidence of a cyberattack, but more likely an internal technical error that caused a "chain failure" in interconnected systems.
The outage has also affected British banks Lloyds and Halifax, as well as the government website GOV.UK.
AWS, which holds about 30% of the global cloud market, has stated that engineers are working to resolve the problem and investigate the causes.