Some of the world's biggest apps and websites appear to have stopped working.

Roblox, Snapchat, Fortnite, Canva and Duolingo are among the services that are down, according to website DownDetector.

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

"We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-East-1 region," the company said in a statement.

"We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understood the root cause.

"We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share."

Amazon Web Services is one of the most popular providers of cloud services in the world.

Popular encrypted messaging service Signal has reports of its service being down.

"We are aware that Signal is down for some people," president Meredith Whittaker said on X.

"This appears to be related to a major AWS outage."

The currency trading app Coinbase confirmed "many" of its users were unable to access its service.

"Our team is working on the issue and we'll provide updates here," the company said.

Graphic design platform Canva said it was experiencing "significantly increased error rates which are impacting functionality".

The software company has about 220 million active monthly users.

"Our team is actively investigating the issue and working to restore full access as quickly as possible," the company said in an update on its website.

More to come…

What is AWS?

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.

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