A major server controlled by Internet giant Amazon crashed briefly yesterday, causing widespread disarray amongst Amazon Cloud users and varying problems for major websites including Netflix, Adobe, AirBnB and the Harvard Business Review.

The Amazon S3 server is used by around 1% of the top 1 million websites, according to SimilarTech. Amazon itself described the problems as “high error rates” rather than outages.

“We’ve identified the problem as high error rates with S3…which is also impacting applications and services dependent on S3,” said a statement from the company. “We are actively working on remediating the issue.”

The outage affected the websites of organisations that function on the S3 server, as well as civilians who store their information via the Amazon Cloud, which also suffered from performance issues.

The affected websites and services were fully restored a few hours after the initial outage, but the web giant has not yet made any comment about the cause of the crash. The location of the crash fault has been narrowed down to a North Virginia location.

The S3 server, which stands for Simple Storage Service, mostly services internet domains in the US, including some government services. The Securities and Exchange Commission was the only one to report significant issues during the crash.

The crash has the potential to spell further problems for Amazon. Its competition for business in the cloud service market is very tight, with Google and Microsoft vying for business in the lucrative market.