Amazon services down for thousands of users

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

Thousands of users across the world 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 was "actively working towards recovery", but gave no timescale.

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.

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.