Alex Emery
BBC News

Tonia from Dalry, North Ayrshire, says she is missing £50 after transferring money to her partner this morning.

She says she doesn't have a bank card so usually transfers money and uses her partner's card to withdraw cash.

"We went to withdraw £15 but it got declined," she says. Tonia transferred another £10 - hoping it was a one off error. But she found that the money was still not there.

As we reported earlier, Lloyds banking group has said all its systems, including online banking for the Bank of Scotland are now up and running.

But Tonia's partner is still waiting for the transaction to complete, with the bank telling them they are trying to resolve the issue "as quickly as they can".

"What an inconvenience this is causing. We have a baby who needs formula," she continues.

Liv McMahon
Technology reporter

Image source, Getty Images

As we've been reporting, many of the larger sites impacted by today's issues appear to have recovered.

Two of the platforms that were hit are gaming giants Roblox and Fortnite, which both boast millions of daily players.

They both updated gamers earlier to say they're back up and running.

Tom Gerken
Technology reporter

At 08:00 BST this morning, reports started flooding in of problems accessing a few apps. By 09:00, it was apparent this had turned into quite a big deal.

We know now that the culprit was something called “DNS resolution” not working properly at Amazon Web Services.

In simple terms, it all comes down to the bit of tech which lets a computer understand what we mean when we see a url like bbc.co.uk.

But the reason it had such a big impact is simply that a massive amount of companies rely on Amazon working properly.

Downdetector told the BBC it had received reports stating more than 1,000 companies were facing problems.

The question now is - will some of these companies look to alternatives?

• After eight hours of disruption, Amazon's cloud computing service (AWS) says some services are still experiencing "significant" errors
• The latest update comes after AWS said, at around 12:00 BST, it had fixed the underlying issue, but noted there would still be problems as they brought everything up to speed
• It appears most of the latest issues are affecting those in the US, with thousands reporting issues using many services in the country as of 15:30 BST, writes technology reporter Tom Gerken
• Platform outage monitor Downdetector says it has seen more than 6.5 million reports globally, affecting more than 1,000 companies since the outage began

Natalie Sherman
New York business reporter

The outage at Amazon may have caused massive disruption for businesses around the world. But investors don't seem to believe it will dent perception of the firm over the long term.

In morning trading in New York, the company’s share price rose about 1%. That was in line with gains seen across the wider market.

By contrast, when cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike sent out a corrupted software update last year, leading to wider disruption, its shares responded by sinking more than 10%.

Shiona McCallum
Technology reporter

With a third of the internet relying on Amazon Web Services, it's easy to see how even a small error can have such a dramatic knock-on effect on apps and sites across the world.

And with much of our lives being online these days, the pressure on cloud services is only increasing all the time.

The relative frequency of these events is highlighting the fragility of these systems.

There will no doubt be questions over resilience and bolstering these systems in the coming days and weeks.

The internet is an intricate network of servers, databases, storage and software. But what option do businesses have but to rely on these big tech giants when they dominate the markets so heavily?

Rozina Sini
BBC News

Image source, Katie Eade

Katie Eade is an online tutor from Derby who teaches students with additional needs or those struggling with their confidence over Zoom.

But the outage this morning has caused "big problems", she says adding that it's left students "very confused".

"I cannot afford to be paying for multiple services just in case they don't work," she says.

Whilst reaping the benefits of technology through her tutoring that operates solely online, Eade still has her reservations.

"Tech companies say they can keep up and make big promises of what they can do, but days like today do make me think how true that is."

Tom Gerken
Technology reporter

Amazon is now reporting "significant" errors for some services.

But it looks like most of the issues are affecting those in the US this time round. Thousands of people have reported issues using many services in the country as of 15:30 BST, including the payment provider Venmo, rewards app Fetch and shopping tool Instacart.

Meanwhile in the UK it does not all seem to be working properly - we have seen some issues still remain when searching on Pinterest’s app, while Duolingo now appears offline and says it is experiencing a “maintenance break”.

Just when it looked like things were getting better, too.

More than 1,800 people have reported issues with Starbucks's mobile app, according to outage monitor Downdetector.

The coffee company allows users to order drinks or get reward points through its app.

A line chart on the Downdetector site shows a sharp spike, external in reports at around 12:00 BST.

It's unknown if this is linked to the Amazon outage, or if it is unrelated.

We have reached out to Starbucks for comment.

Emer Moreau
Business reporter

A spokesperson for Lloyds Banking Group has confirmed that all its systems – including online banking for Halifax and Bank of Scotland – are now running as normal.

Tom Gerken
Technology reporter

Reports of the outages first emerged at 08:00 BST. Now we’re well past 15:00 BST and there are still problems - though lots has been done.

Many sites and services are working properly now, though reports are still coming in for some.

Amazon’s latest update says the firm has “applied multiple mitigations” but it is still seeing errors “for new EC2 instance launches”.

Basically, that means the virtual computers we told youabout earlier still aren’t working properly.

But the main problem which took down so many apps and services today has been fixed.

Cameron is a trainee accountant from London and has spent four hours online today trying to pay for his vital accountancy exams on a webpage that keeps crashing.

“For me, it hasn't just been an inconvenience, it's temporarily stopped my career progress,” he says.

The exams are due to be sat in December, have a short booking window and involve waiting in a virtual queue for a slot.

“Honestly, it feels surreal that a failure in a massive cloud network can have such a direct and scary impact on my actual job. If I can't book these exams in time, my entire ACA timeline will be massively delayed.

“That means serious trouble for my job role, my professional standing at my firm, and my future earning potential,” he says.

Image source, Getty Images

A cloud sharing company boss says today is a "bad day" for Amazon.

Matthew Prince's business Cloudflare uses cloud-based software to help websites and apps connect and remain secure.

Speaking to Radical with Amol Rajan on BBC Radio 4, Prince says that although there are "amazing things" about relying on cloud sharing technology, "if you have an outage like this it can take down a lot of services we rely on.

“Some of the companies were able to stay online, but that comes with complexity and cost and not everyone makes those decisions," he adds.

Ultimately though, Prince says, today's Amazon outage "is not a big deal".

Instead, the tech boss says he's worried about "governments intentionally taking the internet offline".

"If that gets normalised that's a bigger risk to the internet," he explains.

Hannah Karpel
Live reporter

Internet outages can trigger a rise in scams or phishing attempts says Charlotte Wilson, head of enterprise at Checkpoint Software Technologies.

“Artificial intelligence has been used to tailor scam emails to make them feel more personal in moments like this,” she says, referring to emails that may provide fake discounts apologising for the earlier disruption.

“Victims of critical infrastructure are usually only contacted directly if their personal information has been stolen,” Wilson continues, "but users should always go to the company directly before clicking on any links".

Wilson reiterates this outage is a reminder that individuals must save key information offline and back-up important data in more than one place, like on an external hard drive.

“Have multiple backups and don’t be reliant on singular service providers,” she says.

Tom Gerken
Technology reporter

A lot of people may have been surprised today to find out that seemingly so much of the internet relies on just one company for it to work properly.

There are others out there, but it’s fair to say Amazon is the biggest cloud computing provider in town.

Microsoft Azure is a big one used by businesses, particularly those already using Microsoft’s apps like Outlook and Teams.

Google, IBM and Oracle all also offer these services.

There are some smaller ones out there, but you may be wondering why companies like Snapchat don’t just build their own to avoid this kind of risk.

Simply put - it’s expensive and it’s complex. Meanwhile, it is simple and straightforward to use a cloud service that already exists, and most firms will take the path of least resistance.

This morning a lot of firms found out the hard way it isn’t bullet proof.

Jim Reed
Health reporter

We're hearing reports that some NHS services were affected by this morning's outage, although so far any disruption appears to be limited.

London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust, for example, says there was a brief period when its clinical systems went offline as a result of the problem.

The trust, which runs Central Middlesex, Northwick Park and Ealing Hospitals, says its teams continued to provide patient care and everything is now back up and running.

The BBC is continuing to look into a handful of reports of problems at other NHS trusts.

NHS England said, from a national perspective, it was not aware of widespread disruption to its systems as data is held on UK-based servers rather than overseas.

Liv McMahon
Technology reporter

Image source, PA Media

• An outage affecting several critical services provided by cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services knocked hundreds of platforms offline worldwide on Monday morning
• Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox and Lloyds Bank were among the apps and websites which saw thousands of reports from users reporting issues – with platform outage monitor Downdetector saying it had seen more than 6.5 million reports globally, affecting more than 1,000 companies
• Amazon says it has fixed the issue, which occurred in the US at the heart of its cloud computing operations in North Virginia, and services are recovering
• While the outage appears to be mostly resolved, experts say its scale and impact has highlighted the risk of lots of companies relying heavily on one single, dominant provider for vital infrastructure

Reddit says a "fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results", in an update posted on its service status page., external

The platform earlier said its infrastructure was experiencing “degraded performance”.

There has been a spike in reports of problems from users as other sites were recovering, with some saying they had seen a notice saying " “too many requests” when they tried to visit subreddits.

"We are continuing to monitor for any further issues," it adds in the update.

Zoe Kleinman
Technology editor

The mood in AWS HQ is probably rather sombre, to say the least.

When you’re a tech giant with millions of customers, and even more millions of internet users trying to use the services of those customers, if something goes wrong there’s no hiding it.

It may have been caused by a small, common error, but the impact is immediate and dramatic.

Lots of experts are saying this is a classic example of the risk of relying so heavily on one provider.

But the reality is that there aren’t many alternatives - operating on that vast scale is an enormous logistical challenge, it would take a while to build a competitor and cost a lot of money.

Perhaps that's why the UK, and indeed Europe, doesn't have an equivalent to Amazon Web Services.

Why has outage made the internet fall apart?

Liv McMahon
Technology reporter

Earlier we had some insight from Downdetector, the platform many people use to flag problems affecting popular websites, highlighting the scale of today’s AWS issues.

They have now told us the number of reports received globally so far today has soared to more than 6.5 million, affecting more than 1,000 companies.

Downdetector says the amount seen from UK users has, as of 12.30 BST, doubled to more than 800,000 – compared to the roughly 160,000 reports they see from UK users in total on an average weekday.