Amazon crash shows internet 'at mercy of too few providers'

Experts have warned of the perils of relying on a small number of companies for operating the global internet after a glitch at Amazon's cloud computing service brought down apps and websites around the world.

- Dan Milmo Graeme Wearden

The affected platforms included Snapchat, Roblox, Signal and Duolingo as well as a host of Amazon-owned operations, including its main retail site and the Ring doorbell company.

More than 2,000 companies worldwide were affected yesterday, according to Downdetector, a site that monitors internet outages, with 8.1m reports of problems from users, including 1.9m reports in the US, 1m in the UK and 418,000 in Australia.

In the UK, Lloyds bank was affected, as well as its subsidiaries Halifax and Bank of Scotland, while there were also problems accessing the HM Revenue and Customs website yesterday morning.

In the UK alone, reports of problems on individual apps ran into the tens of thousands for each platform. Other affected platforms around the world included Wordle, Coinbase, Slack, Pokémon Go, Epic Games, PlayStation Network and Peloton.