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Why half the internet just went dark
Posted
October 20, 2025
Views
17,543
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October 20, 2025
17,543
266
100
2.09%
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8:48
3:41Now PlayingA major outage caused widespread internet disruption on Monday across the world and left millions of people unable to access sites including HMRC, Snapchat, Fortnite, and Duolingo.
Tech journalist Chris Stokel-Walker joins Shelagh Fogarty to explain how this happened.
The outage also affected work apps such as Slack and Canva, National Rail, phone and broadband companies including BT, Vodafone and EE and Amazon services including Amazon.com, Amazon Alexa, Ring and Amazon Prime Video.
The outage is caused by issues with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the US which are impacting apps which depend on its infrastructure, according to service disruption platform Downdetector, which showed a spike in failures reported from 8am (midnight PST).
Major British banks including Lloyds and Halifax were among the services also affected, as well as GOV.UK, which is needed for applying for visas, renewing passports, and managing taxes.
HMRC confirmed on Monday that some of its customers have been impacted by the outage, with a spokesperson saying: "We're aware that customers are having problems accessing our online services, as part of global issues affecting Amazon Web Services. We're working urgently with them on this matter.
"Our phonelines are currently busy as a result, so for anything that isn't urgent we recommend calling at a later time."
Billions of users are now thought to be affected, with a spike in reports of users being unable to access a host of popular sites began on Monday morning.
Shortly after 10.30am GMT, AWS confirmed they were seeing "significant signs of recovery" as they attempted to overcome issues.
The problem was linked to an issue at Amazon Web Services (AWS), with their infrastructure supporting many of today's best known internet sites and apps.
It took the company 78 minutes to identify the issue and begin rolling out a fix.
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