Lloyds Bank, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland have experienced online service disruptions due to an outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The outage, reported shortly after 9 AM UK time, is impacting several widely-used applications, including Snapchat, Signal, and Zoom, as well as the crypto exchange Coinbase and His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.
A status update on the AWS website, posted around 10 AM UK time, indicated: “We have identified a potential root cause for error rates for the DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region… We are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.”
Downdetector, a website monitoring outages, has noted that thousands of customers from UK banks are facing issues with card payments and accessing their online accounts.
Amazon’s cloud services act as the backbone for many apps and online services, including numerous high street banks in the UK.
This is not the first outage affecting banks this year; in February, over 1.2 million customers of Lloyds, TSB, HSBC, and Nationwide were impacted.
A report by the UK Treasury Committee in March revealed that outages affecting UK banks over the past two years have accumulated to more than two months.
As of now, no statements have been issued by the affected banks.