Major internet outage reported across Europe

Outage

Large parts of Europe experienced a major internet outage on Monday afternoon, knocking many popular services and mobile apps offline.

An issue with TeliaSonera's transatlantic network, which helps link European and the US internet services via underwater cables, appears to have caused problems with web hosting companies CloudFare and Amazon Web Services, reports The Independent.

The issues affected sites and services like WhatsApp, Slack and Reddit, with users reporting they were either slow or completely inaccessible.

"AWS is down. Amazon, Twitch, Netflix, Slack, Paypal, Microsoft and Reddit are all affected. Is this the only remaining refuge?" wrote Twitter user Andreas Ekegren.

I have MAJOR problems with @awscloud, @CloudFlare and @digitalocean. The whole Internet just ground to a halt. Eagerly waiting for a report," tweeted user Joonas.

In a statement on its status page, CloudFlare said:"CloudFlare is observing network performance issues in some European locations. We are actively working to reduce or eliminate any impact to internet users in this region."

The company has since updated its status page to say a fix was implemented and the incident has been resolved.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) also reported that an "external provider" caused some problems on Monday, according to The Inquirer, but that everything is now working the way it should.

"Between 5:10am and 6:01sm PDT an external provider outside our network experienced an issue which impacted internet connectivity between some customer networks and the EU-WEST-1 Region," the company said. "Connectivity to instances and services in the Region was not impacted by the event. The issue is resolved and the service is working normally."