Users on Down Detector, a website which measures outages, have reported difficulties accessing a range of popular services including Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Canva and Duolingo.

The problems appear to stem from Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides infrastructure for many major websites and apps.

The technology giant has confirmed its engineers are working to fix the problem.

Down Detector shows a huge list of sites and apps that users are reporting errors.

Some services have confirmed their issue is linked with Amazon Web Services, while Down Detector has reported others are likely to be impacted by the issue.

Websites experiencing difficulties include:

SnapchatMy Fitness PalEpic Games StoreFortniteCanvaRobloxHingeTinderSignalDuolingoPlayStation NetworkXBoxSteamUbisoft ConnectPokemon GoVideo service ZoomXeroEA GamesStravaTelstraOptusMusic service TidalRing doorbellsOnline game Among USLloyds BankHalifax (UK bank)SlackRedditAmazon AlexaLife360SignalBT (British Telecom)Bank of ScotlandVirgin MediaVodafoneEE3 (British telco)Blink SecurityHM Revenue and CustomsMicrosoft 365Microsoft OutlookMicrosoft TeamsJust EatWhatsapp

What has Amazon Web Services said?

Just after 8pm AEDT, Amazon Web Services said its engineers had “identified a potential root cause” of the outage and services were being restored.

“We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS Services,” the company said in a statement.

“We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered.

“We continue to work towards full resolution and will provide updates as we have more information to share.”

Is Snapchat down right now?

One of the biggest websites affected by the outage has been Snapchat, a social media platform with about 900 million active monthly users.

Users reported difficulty logging into Snapchat after being met with error messages.

The company told users on X its team was looking into the issue.

What is Amazon Web Services?

Amazon Web Services provides cloud computing.

AWS is a subsidiary of Amazon, the mega company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest people.

“Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centres and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis,” AWS says.

It says its customers are companies “of every type, size and industry”.

It provides infrastructure that is used for data backup, disaster recovery, email, virtual desktops, software development and testing, big data analytics, and customer-facing web applications.