By bizn_fun 
Dozens of websites, banks and apps are being affected by a major internet outage.
The problem, which started on Monday morning, appears to be related to an issue at Amazon Web Services (AWS).
As of 9.20am, there were more than 2,000 reports of the Amazon Web Services outage in the US alone, according to Downdetector, which monitors issues and outages in real-time.
Follow live updates here
On its service status page, the company said it was seeing “increased error rates” and delays with “multiple AWS services”.
Here’s what we know so far.
What has been affected?
Multiple banks, the UK’s Government Gateway services – which is accessed through the Gov.uk website, mobile phone networks and video-chatting platform Zoom are among the websites reportedly having technical issues.
All Amazon products – including Prime Video, Alexa and Amazon Music – have also been affected, as well as the main Amazon website.
According to Downdetector, nearly 50 outlets have been affected. Here’s a full list:
• Amazon
• Amazon Alexa
• Amazon Music
• Amazon Prime Video
• Amazon Web Services
• Ancestry
• Asana
• Atlassian
• Bank Of Scotland
• Blink Security
• BT
• Canva
• Clash Of Clans
• Clash Royale
• Coinbase
• Dead By Daylight
• Duolingo
• EE
• Epic Games Store
• Eventbrite
• Flickr
• Fortnite
• Government Gateway services
• Halifax
• Hay Day
• Hinge
• HMRC
• IMDB
• Jira
• Life360
• Lloyds Bank
• Microsoft 365
• My Fitness Pal
• Peloton
• Perplexity AI
• Playstation Network
• Pokemon Go
• Ring
• Roblox
• Rocket League
• Signal
• Sky Mobile
• Slack
• Smartsheet
• Snapchat
• Strava
• Square
• Tidal
• WhatsApp
• Wordle
• Xero
• Zoom
Pic: PA
Pic: PA
What has AWS said?
AWS confirmed it was suffering from “increased error rates and latencies” for multiple services.
In a statement on its website, the company said: “We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause,” an update on its website says.
“We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share.”
The company is posting regular updates on the situation and said its engineers were “immediately engaged” as soon as they spotted the issue.
What to do if you are affected
Sky News’ science and technology reporter Mickey Carroll says those affected by the outage are partly at the mercy of AWS to get their services back up and running.
But in the meantime, Hayley Andrews Smith, an automations specialist working at Myriad, advised people on LinkedIn to check their business’s automated processes as “anything hosted on AWS might be affected”.
She also suggested pausing critical workflows until the systems are back up.
Carroll says people should also keep their guard up for scammers.
Pic: PA
Has something like this happened before?
Last year, CrowdStrike accidentally brought parts of the world to a standstill when the update introduced a bug.
Although it took just 78 minutes for the company to identify the problem and start rolling out a fix, the impact of the outage lasted far longer.
The company has now been sued by its own shareholders as well as Delta Airlines after it cancelled thousands of flights because of the shutdown.
In the UK, the CrowdStrike outage left GPs unable to access systems that manage appointments or allow them to view patient records or even send prescriptions to pharmacies.
Flights were cancelled or delayed and passengers were left stranded as airline systems were knocked offline or staff were forced to handwrite boarding passes and luggage tags.