Amazon Web Services is the best.

Severe weather in Sydney appears to have been to blame for Sunday evening’s nationwide outageof websites and online services.

From around 4pm users had issues accessing services including Menulog, Dominos and Go Get, as well as many websites including those belonging to Fairfax Media. Several streaming services were also down, including Stan and Foxtel Play.

In many cases, social media representatives for the affected companies and services pointed to Amazon as the cause of the issue, with the company confirming at 4.49pm that its Web Services platform was affected by a power outage.

An AWS spokesperson said the issues around EFTPOS were not connected to the Amazon Web Services issue.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a platform that gives clients easy access to cloud and computing functions that would otherwise require them to build and maintain their own server farms. The most central services offered by AWS — Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) — provide virtual computers for clients to rent and cloud storage space respectively. Both of these services (among many others) were affected by the power loss, meaning clients would have been unable to perform any computing functions on their virtual machines or access any stored files on the cloud.