Major outage causing issues across the Internet today

If you're having trouble with your favourite website today, we might know why.

A major outage at Amazon Web Services, which hosts several of the web's big sites, is causing scattered issues across the Internet this afternoon.

The outage appears to have began at 12:44pm EST and seems to be continuing as of 3 p.m. EST.

Amazon is reporting "high error rates" with its S3 web service serving the Eastern U.S. and Canada from its Northern Virginia data centre.

S3 is used by 148,213 websites, or about 1 per cent of the top 1 million sites on the web, including Imgur, Giphy, Trello, Yahoo mail, and parts of the Adobe cloud.

An update from Amazon at 2:35pm EST stated:

"We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is impacting various AWS services. We are working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue."