An array of organisations and services are reported to have been affected by the incident, including UK telcos and financial services, as well as HMRC and its Government Gateway platform

The government has indicated that it has activated incident-response mechanisms after scores of major online apps and services around the world have been affected by technical issues with Amazon Web Services hosting.

Around 8am UK time the cloud giant first reported “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services” related to its datacentres in the Virginia on the east coast of the US. Ion

Since then, there have been widespread reports of websites and digital services affected by the incident – including HMRC and its Government Gateway login system, which has 50 million registered users in the UK. Lloyds, Halifax and the Bank of Scotland have also reportedly been impacted, as have BT, EEE and Sky Mobile – as well as a range of the internet’s most popular sites and services, including Reddit, Slack, Snapchat, WhatsApp. The likes of Peloton bikes and Ring doorbells are also understood to have suffered outages as a result.

Amid this large-scale disruption, a spokesperson for the UK government said: “We are aware of an incident affecting Amazon Web Services, and several online services which rely on their infrastructure. Through our established incident response arrangements, we are in contact with the company, who are working to restore services as quickly as possible.”

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Within two and a half hours of the first reports, AWS’s service health update page said that “we are seeing significant signs of recovery [and] most requests should now be succeeding”.

By 11.30am, the cloud vendor said that “the underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now”. As of 1.10pm, the company was still working towards full recovery and was “now working through processing the backlog” caused by the incident.

The Open Cloud Coalition (OCC) – a membership body formed a year ago to advocate for a more fair and diverse cloud market – claimed that today’s incident demonstrates the dangers of the current landscape’s AWS and Microsoft duopoly.

OCC senior advisor Nicky Stewart said: “Today’s massive AWS outage is a visceral reminder of the risks of over-reliance on two dominant cloud providers, an outage most of us will have felt in some way. It’s too soon to gauge the economic fallout but, for context, last year’s global CrowdStrike outage was estimated to have cost the UK economy between £1.7bn and £2.3bn. Incidents like this make clear the need for a more open, competitive and interoperable cloud market; one where no single provider can bring so much of our digital world to a standstill.”