Roblox, Fortnite and Snapchat down in big outage

What is Amazon Web Services and how has the outage affected platforms around the world?

Many of the world's biggest websites and apps including Snapchat, Fortnite and Roblox have gone down today after a massive internet service issue.

More than 500 companies from around the world reported issues getting their apps and websites to work, according to Downdetector, a website that monitors internet outages.

This includes big gaming platforms like Fortnite, Roblox, Playstation Network and PokemonGo.

Some banks, including Lloyds, Halifax and the Bank of Scotland, have also had problems with some people reporting not being able to pay for things or log into their account.

The problem is all to do with an important internet company called Amazon Web Services (AWS) that lots of other web based services rely on.

Read on to find out what has happened and when it will be fixed...

What is Amazon Web Service and why did this happen?

Many gaming services, including the Playstation network, went down

Many of the apps and websites affected during the big outage run using Amazon Web Services (AWS) - which is the world's largest cloud computing platform, and is owned by Amazon.

Just after midnight in the US, Amazon Web Services reported that a IT problem was affecting services at their Virginia data centre in the US.

Soon after this, reports from all over the world came through that apps and websites using AWS were also experiencing issues.

AWS announced that their engineers were working hard to find and fix the issue as quickly as possible.

By 11:20 (GMT) they said most services should be working again:

"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."

The UK government has said it is monitoring the situation: "We are aware of an incident affecting Amazon Web Services, and several online services which rely on their infrastructure.

"Through our established incident response arrangements, we are in contact with the company, who are working to restore services as quickly as possible."