Outage of Amazon cloud disrupts Internet traffic

san francisco - Amazon had difficulty sending and receiving clients' data for more than three-and-a-half hours

Web users experienced widespread glitches on Tuesday, from news sites to government services, after Amazon.com's popular cloud service that hosts their data suffered a technical disruption.

Amazon's Simple Storage Service, or Amazon S3, had difficulty sending and receiving clients' data for more than three-and-a-half hours, according to company status reports online. Amazon did not disclose the cause and some of its smaller cloud applications in North America continued to have trouble.

The far reach of the disruption underscored the increasing dependence of organisations on the cloud for cheap and secure data storage. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world's biggest cloud business.

Apple on its website reported issues with its app store, music-streaming service and other products, which it later resolved. The iPhone maker has previously said it uses Amazon S3 for some storage.

Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of tech website The Verge, said on Twitter that an article "published without an image because our image system runs on AWS." Messaging start-up Slack Technologies said users may have had difficulty uploading files due to problems with its hosting service, according to posts on Twitter.

"Imagine your business not being able to run for a day. That's a big problem," said Gene Munster, head of research for Loup Ventures.

The disruption extended beyond the business world. A site for Georgetown University professors to manage course content and grade assignments, which relies on Amazon's cloud, had "connectivity problems," the university's chief information officer said in a message to students and faculty. - Reuters