Amazon web services outage takes businesses_ services offline

Amazon and some other services including Prime Video and Alexa have been hit by computer problems.

Thousands of users in the United States have been reporting problems on the outage tracking website Downdetector.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing arm_ which provides services to governments_ companies and universities_ is also affected.

Amazon said it had identified the cause and has "seen some signs of recovery"_ but gave no timescale for a solution.

The company added that not all regions of the world had experienced problems. There are reports the biggest disruption for customers is being seen on the US east coast.

On the Amazon shopping website_ many users reported just a slow loading of pages rather than an inability to use the service.

However_ services including Amazon's Ring security cameras_ mobile banking app Chime and robot vacuum cleaner maker iRobot were also facing issues according to their social media pages and Twitter.

"A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage is currently impacting our iRobot Home App_" iRobot wrote on its website.

Ring also said it was working to solve the issues.

It is the third outage for Amazon this year. In June users experienced a brief outage on Amazon platforms_ including Alexa and Prime Video.

That incident also hit several other companies_ including Shopify_ PayPal and the news group CNN.

In July the e-commerce giant experienced disruption of its online stores service_ which lasted for nearly two hours and affected almost 40_000 users.

The latest problems come as Amazon customers ramp up their Christmas purchases.

But outage problems at AWS_ the biggest cloud computing company in the world_ could be more serious because of the large number of corporate customers.

There are reports in the US that users of McDonald's_ Netflix_ Disney_ and several other AWS clients_ are having problems.