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Amazon's widely used cloud-computing technology suffered significant technical problems in its Eastern U.S. operations, taking chunks of Internet-connected services from its customers offline Tuesday morning.

The problems are causing stories to take several hours to update on a wide range of websites, including StarTribune.com.

The company offered few details about the outage, instead pointing to the Amazon Web Services health dashboard, which noted that programming interfaces at its data centers in the Eastern United States were "seeing impact." It added the problems extended to its monitoring and incident response technology, "which is delaying our ability to provide updates." Amazon noted that it identified the cause and was working toward resolving the problems.

The company posted midafternoon that it had no estimated time that the problems would be fully resolved.

A number of AWS customers noted problems with their services Tuesday morning. Smartsheet, which provides collaboration software, noted on its status page that its service was unavailable "due to an outage in AWS." Asana, which offers project management services, noted that some of its offerings were unavailable because of the AWS outage.

Amazon's own Ring home security business noted on its website that its app was having problems saving changes made by customers, as well as live views from its cameras failing to connect to the app. Ring spokeswoman Emma Daniels said the services' issues were related to the AWS problems.

Amazon spokeswoman Kristin Brown declined to offer details about the outage beyond what the company posted on the AWS dashboard. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

AWS is the world's largest provider of cloud-computing services, which let customers rent data storage and processing capabilities over the Web instead of running their own data centers. In 2020, AWS held 40.8 percent of the worldwide market for infrastructure cloud services, according to market research firm Gartner. It's closest rival, Microsoft, held 19.7 percent of the global market.