Amazon's cloud services unit, AWS, which provides computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals, experienced an outage Monday.

The disruption caused widespread connectivity issues for major online companies around the world.

According to the internet services monitoring platform Downdetector, Amazon's own shopping website, Prime Video and Alexa all faced problems.

AWS identified the issue as a problem with a regional gateway on the US East Coast.

Hours later, it said "underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated," with services returning to normal operations at 18:00 Eastern Time (00:00 CET).

Disruption hits internet services

The AWS outage was the most significant internet disruption since last year's CrowdStrike failure, which crippled tech systems in hospitals, banks and airports worldwide.

Websites and apps affected on Monday included Perplexity, Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat, and Duolingo.

Various video streaming platforms, such as Hulu and Disney+, and the messaging app Signal were also impacted.

In Europe, several major mobile phone operators, some UK banks, WhatsApp and Tinder were affected, according to Downdetector.

Edited by: Elizabeth Schumacher