Large sections of the internet are down due to a widespread reported issue with Amazon Web Services which many websites rely on.
The platform, Amazon Music and Prime video, Alexa and and Amazon Web Services (AWS), which offers a series of services for online applications, all started experiencing problems this afternoon.
DownDetector, a site that monitors online outages, shows North America, parts of Europe and Asia are all experiencing issues.
The crash comes just 18 days before Christmas with Twitter flooded with complaints from would-be shoppers.
But the nature of the AWS outage means other websites are also struggling or not able to update at all.
There was a similar AWS-wide issue in July when services were disrupted for almost two hours with more than 38,000 issues reported with Amazon online stores.
On its health service dashboard, AWS posted a message at 11.22am (Eastern US time) that the company is "investigating increased error rates for the AWS Management Console."
“We are experiencing API and console issues in the US-EAST-1 Region. We have identified root cause and we are actively working towards recovery,” AWS said in the message.
A spokesperson for the company declined to detail the identified cause and told The Hill that the message will be updated on the health service dashboard “as it’s ready.”
A later update said: "We have identified the root cause and are actively working towards recovery."
