Major Outage At Amazon Disrupts Businesses Across The US

Amazon’s cloud-service network suffered a major outage Tuesday, disrupting access to many popular sites.

The service provides remote computing services to many companies, governments and universities and companies, including The Associated Press.

For roughly five hours, companies dependent on Amazon's web services network to run their operations struggled to find workarounds.

Among them was Amazon's own e-commerce operation. Critics said the issue highlighted the danger of centralizing too many of the internet's key functions.

By 5 p.m. ET, Amazon said it had identified and fixed the underlying problem, although many online services took even longer to recover.