Amazon Web Services is down, and the Amazon web site is struggling to load pages in some Countries, Prime Video and Alexa is also struggling to understand what you say.

At this stage it’s not known whether the outage will wreak havoc on the e-commerce giant’s delivery operation in Australia today, with the possibility that the network used to supply drivers with information could again crash.

Thousands of users across the world have been reporting problems on the outage tracking website Downdetector.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing arm, which provides services to Australian banks governments, major retailers and companies and universities, is also affected.

Amazon said it had identified the cause and was “actively working towards recovery” but gave no timescale.

The company added that not all regions of the world had experienced problems.

There are reports the biggest disruption for customers is being seen on the US east coast.

On the Amazon shopping website, many users reported just a slow loading of pages rather than an inability to use the service.

However, services including Amazon’s Ring security cameras, mobile banking app Chime and robot vacuum cleaner maker iRobot were also facing issues according to their social media pages and Twitter.

It is the third outage for Amazon this year.

In June users experienced a brief outage on Amazon platforms, including Alexa and Prime Video.

That incident also hit several other companies, including Shopify, PayPal, and the news group CNN.

The latest problems come as Amazon customers ramp up their Christmas purchases.

But outage problems at AWS, the biggest cloud computing company in the world, could be more serious because of the large number of corporate customers.

There are reports in the US that users of McDonald’s, Netflix, Disney, and several other AWS clients, are having problems.