UK banks' online services are beginning to recover after a problem with Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused widespread outages across several apps and websites.
According to website Downdetector, the outage has led to more than 4m reports from users involving 500 companies, including popular apps like Wordle and DuoLingo.
Also among those affected this morning were UK high street banks such as Halifax, Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Bank.
All three banks, which are part of Lloyds Banking Group, have reported that services are now coming back online.
Meanwhile, AWS has issued a statement to say that, while the issue that caused the outage has been fixed, there may still be issues as services are brought back online.
"We are continuing to work towards full recovery for EC2 launch errors, which may manifest as an Insufficient Capacity Error. Additionally, we continue to work toward mitigation for elevated polling delays for Lambda, specifically for Lambda Event Source Mappings for SQS."
The outage will doubtless lead to a greater focus on the dependency on a small number of cloud providers, such as Amazon, and the fallout when such a service suffers technical issues.
There will also be numerous comments on what caused the outage, According to Marek Szustak, IT security officer at online travel agency eSky Group, the issues are related to the Domain Name System (DNS) which acts as the internet's phonebook.
"When domain name resolution stops working, entire applications and services can stop responding, no matter how well they are designed," he said in comments reported by the Guardian. "This is a good lesson for companies using the cloud: it is worth designing systems so that a failure in one region or provider does not bring the entire business to a halt. Redundancy, geographical distribution of resources and testing of emergency scenarios should be the norm, not a luxury.
The outage is also likely to lead to a series of disputes between end users and payment companies over transactions that were not completed this morning.
“When AWS sneezes, half the internet catches the flu," said Monica Eaton, founder and CEO of payments fintech Chargebacks911 and Fi911. "Outages like this cause frustrated users, but also triggers a domino effect across payment flows.
“The outage will end long before the disputes do. Any business that treats this as a one-day incident is already behind. Downtime happens, but silence and slow responses are what cause real damage," said Eaton.