Amazon problems bring down websites

Amazon Web Services' S3 storage product was down on Tuesday afternoon, causing major problems for websites that utilize Amazon for Internet storage. In a short message on the top of their support page Amazon reported "high error rates" on S3 and they were working to fix it. For more than an hour the rest of the support site listed all services as "good." Apparently, the problems affected Amazon's ability to display the extent of the outages.

The problems also brought down service to the Alexa "smart device" that the internet giant produces.

Multiple website that rely on Amazon were not loading and were replaced with error messages. On other sites, video and images were having problems loading. Amazon initially reported that only the East Coast was affected but Twitter users in other regions reported problems with Amazon services. Amazon was later able to post widespread outage reports.

The site isitdownrightnow.com, which reports on website outages, appeared to be offline during the outage.

(Note: This website uses Amazon Web Services for storage, which is impacting images and video displaying properly.)