Thousands have ‘payments declined’ as major banks affected by half the internet ‘going down’

The world has gone into meltdown this morning as 'half the internet' has suddenly stopped working.

Thousands of people woke up to find that a slew of their everyday apps are facing issues, including Snapchat, Amazon, Canva, WhatsApp, Duolingo, and many more.

It began earlier today (20 October) when Downdetector, a website that tracks complaints about websites and web services not working, showed a sudden and widespread outage across several apps.

Also affected are the likes of Roblox, Clash Royale, Life360, My Fitness Pal, Xero, Amazon Music, Prime Video, Clash of Clans, Fortnite, Wordle, Coinbase, HMRC, PlayStation and Pokémon Go, to name a few.

And now, thousands of people are reportedly currently unable to use their banking apps, posing huge problems for those who need to pay bills or were in the shops when the issues started.

What is the issue and what has Amazon said?

The problems appear to be related to an issue at Amazon Web Services, which is Amazon’s cloud computing platform that lets people 'rent' servers without the need to buy physical computers or data centres.

The first update, which was shared on Amazon's service status update page, said: "We are investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region. We will provide another update in the next 30-45 minutes."

This was followed by regular updates, with the most recent reading that they are beginning to see 'signs of recovery'.

It reads: "We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS Services. We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered. We continue to work towards full resolution and will provide updates as we have more information to share."

What are the issues with banking?

However, as we say, people are still reporting problems and according to the BBC and DownDetector, more than 500 companies are facing issues.

And among the chaos, thousands of people are claiming bank outages, with some people reporting that their cards are declining.

People have reported being unable to log in to their online and mobile banking apps, as well as being unable to make payments.

The banks in question which are facing problems are Lloyds, as well as its subsidiaries Halifax and Bank of Scotland.

Both Lloyds Bank and Halifax have since taken to Twitter to issue a statement apologising, writing: "You may have seen reports of issues with Amazon Web Services affecting a number of websites and apps across the UK today.

"We know this is impacting some of our services right now. We're sorry about this. Please bear with us as we investigate this."

Taking to the replies section, worried users are expressing their concerns, demanding to know when everything will be back up and running, and demanding compensation.

One Twitter user furiously wrote: "I need compensation. I can’t get to work cause it won’t let me even spend money I demand 1000£ compensation!!!"

While a second added: "I cant pay my bills what are use doing there due today" and a third wrote: "You all just better be compensating everyone because this is bad I am stuck in the shops as I can’t pay!!!"

"Here’s hoping you get it back up soon. Can’t access my account and it’s quite frustrating," penned someone else.

While another user desperately questioned: "This is ridiculous nothing is working not online banking not chip and pin or contactless!!!!! How long?"

Tyla has contacted Amazon for comment - you can see their continuing updates here.