Amazon Web Services, a major cloud hosting service, had a system failure on Tuesday that affected numerous websites and apps.
The issue was not fixed until just before 5 p.m. ET.
AWS had reported on its Service Health Dashboard at 2:35 p.m. ET that its engineers were working on the problem, which affected websites including Netflix, Reddit and Adobe.
The Associated Press reported that its own photos, webfeeds and other online services were also affected. And at approximately 3 p.m. ET, Mashable tweeted that it was also struggling.
"We can't publish our story about AWS being down because, well, AWS is down," the news outlet tweeted.
Even Amazon had issues. AWS tweeted that the performance of its own Service Health Dashboard was affected for a while.
For AWS' part, "We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is impacting various AWS services," the company noted on its dashboard. "We are working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue."
Amazon S3, or Simple Storage Service, offers storage through web service interfaces.
US-EAST-1 refers to a region of data centers in northern Virginia.
While companies were dealing with the outage, some people were having a laugh about it on Twitter.
"Due to the #AWS outage and its impact to Snapchat & other popular apps, millions of millennials just looked up for the first time in years," tweeted @psghosh.
And @Woot tweeted, "THINGS THAT RUN ON #AWS
- the entire internet
- sharks
- the weather
- happiness
- the sun
- the oscars' best picture results."