Hundreds of websites and apps were hit by a major outage on Monday October 20.

Millions of people have been affected by the Amazon Web Services problems.

Companies hit include Lloyds Bank, Zoom, online gaming business, Snapchat,  and the UK’s HMRC tax office,

Websites that tracks complaints about outages, showed thousands of problems on Monday morning.

Amazon Web Services describes itself as “the world’s most comprehensive” cloud service.

AWS offers companies a virtual backbone, giving them access to servers, databases and storage without having to build their own infrastructure.

Rowland Manthorpe, Tech Correspondent for Sky News said: “The problem here is apparently a DNS issue related to Amazon’s data centres in North Virginia. DNS is the address book for the internet so this means that Amazon has a connection problem.

“The data centre itself might be fine, but all those apps and websites can’t find it. It’s like a postman trying to post a letter when the address has rubbed off.”

The UK government told Sky News it was “aware of an incident affecting Amazon Web Services” after HMRC was among those affected by the outage.

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

Around three hours after the problems began, AWS issued an update saying its engineers “are seeing significant signs of recovery”.

In the US, there were long queues at LaGuardia airport in New York as check-in kiosks appeared to be failing and apps were down, according to The New York Times.

Similar issues caused chaos a year ago when the Crowdstrike outage did billions of damage to Europe’s economy in a single day,