A global outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) hit companies and organisations around the world, as the IT giant’s cloud computing services had technical issues, making it impossible to use many web sites and vital services hosted on the IT giant’s servers.

The issue kicked off just after 5am this morning UK time, with Amazon saying it was ‘investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services’, which affected ‘multiple Availability Zones (AZs) in US-EAST-1’. It also flagged problems with customer queries to the AWS Support Center and the Support API.

The company is still working to resolve the issue, which affected 65 services, including AWS Database Migration Service, AWS Verified Access and AWS End User Messaging. This had a major knock-on effect on multiple organisations while consumers were hit as sites from McDonalds to Amazon and Snapchat to Xero and Lambda all went down.