Banks and HMRC affected in Amazon Web Services outage

DISRUPTION affecting Amazon Web Services led to a spike in reported outages across a wide range of internet services including those of HMRC, Halifax and Lloyds.

- SAM HALL

Downdetector, a website which tracks complaints about online services, showed a spike in reports yesterday, including more than 2,681 at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and 500 reports of issues for the HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) website by 9am.

Other services showing a spike included Snapchat, Slack and Ring.

Reported outages on Downdetector appeared to spike between 9am and 10am for most services, and then decline through yesterday morning, with AWS stating at 10.27am it had seen “significant signs of recovery”. AWS added at 11.35am that the “underlying DNS (domain name system) issue has been fully mitigated”.

Customers also reported an increase in outage reports at UK banks including Lloyds, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland.

Professor Alan Woodward said history suggests the AWS outage will have been caused by “something relatively simple like a misconfiguration in DNS or BGP (border gateway protocol)”.