A major outage has caused ‘half the internet’ to go down – with millions of people left unable to access sites including Snapchat, Fortnite, and Duolingo.

The problem lies with Amazon Web Services – a cloud computing service that powers much of the infrastructure behind many websites.

The outage has also affected Amazon services including Amazon.com, Amazon Alexa, Ring and Amazon Prime Video.

The issues began shortly after 8am BST Monday, according to DownDetector, with more than 6,000 reports from affected US customers.

Another 1,600 users and counting are affected in the UK, according to DownDetector, a site that monitors internet outages.

Jake Moore, tech expert and security advisor at ESET, thinks the huge outage is likely due to an 'internal error' at Amazon.

However, he says we can’t rule out a cyberattack at this stage.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, he said: ‘While a cyberattack can’t be ruled out until AWS releases its full post-incident report, there’s no current evidence of hacking, data breaches or coordinated attacks.’

DownDetector gets network status updates from social media platforms, reports submitted to its website and other sources around the web. 

It 'only reports an incident when the number of problem reports is significantly higher than the typical volume for that time of day'. 

According to the site, the issue stems from problems at Amazon’s massive data center site in North Virginia (us-east-1), a critical hub for the global internet.

In all, 75 per cent of the reported problems are coming from us-east-1, while the remainder are coming from two other US sites.  

AWS provides cloud computing services to individuals, universities, governments and companies worldwide, such as servers, storage, networking, remote computing, email, mobile development and security. 

When AWS goes down, so do other websites that use its services, which is an embarrassing blow to the Amazon-owned platform – as these companies, universities, individuals and governments pay to use the services. 

The tech giant has acknowledged the issue on the AWS Health Dashboard page, saying that there is an 'operational issue' affecting 'multiple services'. 

'Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause,' it said. 

As yet it is unclear what the exact cause of the outage is; Daily Mail has contacted AWS for comment. 

There are many causes behind online outages, but the problem is mostly because of technical errors relating to configuration. 

However, other outages are due to cyber attacks – attempts by criminals to damage or destroy a computer network or system. 

Mr Moore said this error looks to have caused a 'cascading failure where one system’s slowdown disrupted others' across the platform. 

'It once again highlights the dependency we have on relatively fragile infrastructures with very limited backup plans for such outages,' he told the Daily Mail. 

'AWS has about 30 per cent of the global cloud infrastructure market which makes up a large proportion of the internet. 

'So an outage like this can hit hard across the world.' 

'Because so many global apps and websites rely so heavily on AWS for cloud hosting and data processing, the disruption rapidly becomes widespread and creates a knock on effect to many services.' 

Dr Manny Niri, senior cyber security lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, thinks there has been a 'serious failure' at North Virginia (us-east-1). 

'The wide disruption of major services, from Amazon’s own platforms like Prime Video and Alexa to other services like Snapchat and Fortnite, appears, from what we know so far, to indicate a serious failure in the main AWS US-East-1 region,' he told the Daily Mail. 

'This does not seem to be just a small software problem but may involve a failure in a key part of the internet’s backbone, such as networking, storage, or compute services, which are essential for the operation of dependent applications.' 

Dr Niri continued: 'For all affected businesses, this incident is a strong reminder that relying on only one cloud region is very risky. 

'Companies should quickly assess their exposure, ensure they use multiple regions and failover systems, and maintain robust offline backups. 

'While cloud computing is very useful, this outage highlights the need for better resilience, redundancy, and clear communication from providers to reduce the impact of such problems and maintain customer trust.'