AWS outage disrupts major apps and sites as UK users report widespread errors

An Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage left many of the world’s biggest apps and websites struggling this morning, with UK users seeing sign-in failures, timeouts and slow pages from around 08:00. The disruption rippled through social apps, gaming platforms, banking tools and productivity services, underlining how much of the internet now runs on Amazon’s cloud.

Engineers reported “increased error rates” and delays affecting multiple services while mitigation was applied. Traffic gradually rerouted, but knock-on effects continued for customer apps that rely on those services at scale.

The AWS outage highlighted a familiar risk for digital platforms. When a core cloud region or a widely used service stalls, even briefly, dependent apps can fail in unexpected ways. Some users could still open apps, but actions such as payments, two-factor prompts, searches or media uploads would not complete.

UK organisations felt the impact across everyday tasks. Commuters checking travel updates, small firms processing orders, and students logging in for lessons all reported issues. Gaming and fitness platforms also faltered during peak morning use.

Operators typically advise patience during a widespread incident. Status pages and incident dashboards are updated in stages while teams throttle traffic, add capacity or roll back changes. For businesses, the lesson is architectural rather than purely operational. Multi-availability-zone design, read-only fallbacks, cached content for high-traffic pages and graceful-degradation paths can limit visible failures when an upstream service blips.

Cloud incidents are not new, but their reach has grown with the scale of modern platforms. The AWS outage will prompt another round of resilience reviews, from rate-limiting and back-pressure to alternative queues and background job retries. Customers are also likely to revisit incident communications, ensuring users see clear messages rather than silent timeouts.

For readers who want to track real-time recovery notes during incidents, providers publish rolling updates via their service status page.

For more stories on London’s business, finance and technology, follow EyeOnLondon for informed and independent reporting.

Follow us on:

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for the latest videos and updates!

We value your thoughts! Share your feedback and help us make EyeOnLondon even better!