‘Half the internet’ goes down after Amazon cloud outage leaving millions unable to use Ring, Alexa, and banking apps – as experts say we ‘can’t rule out a cyberattack’

A major outage has affected ‘half the internet’, with millions of people left unable to access sites including Snapchat, Fortnite, and Duolingo, as well as several banking apps.

At 11:35 BST, Amazon said the underlying issue has been ‘fully mitigated’, adding that ‘most operations are succeeding normally now’.

However, the outage continues to wreak havoc around the globe, with millions of customers still experiencing issues accessing their favourite sites.

The problem lies with Amazon Web Services – a cloud computing service that powers much of the infrastructure behind many websites.

The outage has also affected popular Amazon services including Amazon.com, Amazon Alexa, Ring and Amazon Prime Video.

The issues began shortly after 8am BST, according to DownDetector, with more than 6,000 reports from affected US customers.

Another 1,600 users and counting are affected in the UK, according to DownDetector, a site that monitors internet outages.

Jake Moore, tech expert and security advisor at ESET, thinks the huge outage is likely due to an ‘internal error’ at Amazon, but said we can’t rule out a cyberattack at this stage.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, he said: ‘While a cyberattack can’t be ruled out until AWS releases its full post-incident report, there’s no current evidence of hacking, data breaches or coordinated attacks.’

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