Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland appear to have all been affected by an outage, with many of their customers reporting issues accessing their online services. This comes amid a major outage affecting the world’s biggest apps and sites – including Snapchat, Roblox and Duolingo. The issue appears to be linked to problems at Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Downdetecter, a website that tracks complaints about online services, showed a huge spike in reports on Monday morning for websites including HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and a number of banking firms. “I’ve had payment declined despite having money in my account,” one Lloyds customer said. “Unable to access online banking, unable to make payments online, unable to use card,” a Halifax customer added. “Unable to reach Halifax. What the hell?”
Halifax, Lloyds and Bank of Scotland are all owned by the same parent company.
AWS, the world’s largest cloud computing provider, confirmed it was experiencing “increased error rates and latencies” across multiple services this morning.
A service update shared shortly before 9:30am read: “We can confirm significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region.
“This issue also affects other AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region as well. During this time, customers may be unable to create or update Support Cases.
“Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause.”
The issue was first reported at around 8am, with engineers identifying a “potential root cause” roughly two hours later.
“Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1,” an AWS spokesperson said.
It is not clear how long the disruption will last.
