Major update issued after major outage takes ‘half the internet’ down

Thousands of people have been affected

Some of the internet's biggest sites, including Duolingo, Fortnite, Snapchat, Canva and Roblox, went down, according to Down Detector.

The issues began at around 8am UK time, and it appears that the issues are related to issues at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

AWS is a cloud service that provides a lot of infrastructure that supports the internet and millions of companies across the globe.

The service accounts for the majority of Amazon's profits, and made $108 billion last year.

AWS supports a host of websites, ranging from games like Wordle to lifestyle apps like My Fitness Pal.

Even bank customers are reporting outages this morning, with Lloyds customers reporting that they have been unable to access their online banking.

Amazon have issued an update on the situation, and confirmed that they have now identified a potential root cause of the outage.

"We have identified a potential root cause for error rates for the DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region," they said.

"We are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery."

In the latest update, Amazon has said they are seeing 'signs of recovery'.

 "We are seeing significant signs of recovery.

"Most requests should now be succeeding.

"We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests. We will continue to provide additional information," they wrote.