Why 'half the internet’ just stopped working as people begin to freak out

People are seriously freaking out after 'half the internet' appeared to just stop working earlier this morning (20 October).

Downdetector, a website that tracks complaints about websites and web services not working, has shown the sudden and widespread nature of the outage, which has affected a whole load of apps, including Amazon Web Services, Amazon, Canva, Duolingo, Snapchat, Ring and many more.

Other sites and applications which appear to be having problems on Downdetector include: Roblox, Clash Royale, Life360, My Fitness Pal, Xero, Amazon Music, Prime Video, Clash of Clans, Fortnite, Wordle, Coinbase, HMRC, Vodafone, PlayStation and Pokémon Go.

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

It seems like 'half the internet' just stopped working earlier this morning (20 October) (Down Detector)

According to its service status page, the company was seeing 'increased error rates' and delays with 'multiple AWS services'.

The issues began around 8 am in the UK, or midnight Pacific time.

People have since rushed to social media to share their panic over the ordeal with one X user writing: "Holy sh*t the whole f*cking internet is down."

"Wow AWS went down and took half the internet with it," penned a second while a third chimed in: "Just witnessed half of the internet go down lol."

A fourth piped up: "So the entire internet just went down basically?"

"Damn, the AWS outage took down everything on the internet," a fifth wrote.

Another echoed: "Yes it’s not just you. Large parts of the internet are down."

And a final X user added: "Of all the things I could've expected today I was NOT expecting the whole internet to go down."

Amazon has shared two statements following the ordeal (Amazon)

Amazon's service status page has shared two statements under an update titled 'Increased Error Rates and Latencies'.

The first reads: "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."

The second, published around 40 minutes later, added: "We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. This issue may also be affecting Case Creation through the AWS Support Center or the Support API.

"We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause. We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share."

They recently added: "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."