Amazon outage is causing significant problems for sites and apps across the internet

Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing unit of Amazon, suffered a major outage on Tuesday, leaving thousands of users unable to access huge portions of the internet, including a broad range of apps.

The outage, which continues to cause slow loading or access failures, began at around 11 a.m. ET and appears to have been largely concentrated along the East Coast, according to the company.

“We are seeing impact to multiple [Amazon Web Services] APIs [application programming interfaces] in the US-EAST-1 Region,” Amazon said in a post about an hour after issues were first reported, adding that the root cause has been identified and the company is “actively working towards recovery.”

There are some signs of recovery, the update reads.

There is no estimated time for a full recovery at this time.

AWS is a cloud-computing service that allows companies to rent computing, storage and network capabilities, which is why the outage has shut down or slowed access to such a wide variety of sites and apps across the internet.

Users reported problems logging on, not just to Amazon’s products — Amazon.com, Prime Video, Alexa AI, and Kindle — but also Netflix, Venmo, Disney+, Ring, Roku, Duolingo, Chime, Fidelity Investments, and NPR’s own news apps.