Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered an outage last night (Tuesday) that impacted thousands of systems and affected websites across the internet.

Thousands of users reported problems with services, while the issues also affected popular streaming sites like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

Amazon said it had identified the cause and has “seen some signs of recovery” after the outage. The problems appeared to occur mostly in the US East coast.

Many users reported the slow loading of Amazon pages rather than an inability to use the service entirely.

However, services including Amazon’s Ring security cameras, mobile banking app Chime and robot vacuum maker iRobot said they were also facing issues.

The retail giant has supposedly blamed the outage on a traffic surge from an ‘unknown source’ that overwhelmed parts of its cloud network.

In a notice on its status page, Amazon said: “We continue to experience increased API error rates for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. The root cause of this issue is an impairment of several network devices.

“We continue to work toward mitigation, and are actively working on a number of different mitigation and resolution actions.”

Most pertinently, the outage affected Amazon warehouses and deliveries, which in the run up to Christmas could become a major problem for the retail giant.

Workers at Amazon warehouses and delivery drivers reported difficulties accessing the Flex or AtoZ apps, making it impossible to scan packages or access delivery routes.

In the notice, Amazon said many of the the affected services were back online and that it would continue to resolve any further problems, now “working towards recovery of any impaired services”.

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The outage follows on from issues suffered in June when internet users across the world experienced disruption to online stores, which lasted for nearly two hours and affected thousands.

Sites including the UK Government’s official webpage went down as part of the global internet outage, which saw many users encounter a “503 Service Unavailable” message.

The problems at AWS, which is currently the world’s largest cloud computing provider, could be more serious because of the large number of corporate customers.

Currently, companies such as of McDonald’s, Disney, and several other AWS clients, have reported issues with some services.

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