MAJOR websites including SoundCloud and Imgur were offline for more than three hours due to problems with the Amazon Web Services cloud.

The cloud provides infrastructure for much of the internet and many websites and apps were affected before the glitch was fixed.

3 A number of the world's biggest websites experienced issues Credit: Getty Images

3 Amazon Web Services powers an incredible amount of internet infrastructure

Dave Bartoletti, a cloud analyst with Forrester, told USA Today: "This is a pretty big outage.

"It's got north of 3 to 4 trillion pieces of data stored in it."

The outage was significant because companies had private servers in the pasy but many now choose to pay Amazon and other providers to store their data.

Picture of Amazon Web services right now pic.twitter.com/GTKgZ6bSru — Noah Miller (@miller_m33) February 28, 2017

Major companies that use AWS include Pinterest, Airbnb, Netflix, Slack and Spotify. While not all were taken offline, some of them did experience slowdowns, reports the Chicago Tribune.

TechCrunch reports that affected websites and services included Yahoo, Quora, newsletter provider Sailthru, Business Insider, Vox, Marvel Puzzle Quest and Giphy.

Slack, Trello, Splitwise, Vox and Medium were also among the popular internet services that were impacted.

Silicon Valley expert Jorge Arango tweeted: "The internet was designed to route around damage. "We've gone too far towards centralizing infrastructure."

Another twitter user wrote: "With Amazon S3 down, people under the age of 20 get a taste of how janky the internet was in the days before broadband. Enjoy!"

S3 is experiencing high error rates. We are working hard on recovering. — Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) February 28, 2017

The website #isitdownrightnow (which tracks websites that are down) is down right now due to the #Amazonwebservices outage. That's funny. — Franny Kelly (@frannykelly) February 28, 2017

Every time we check to see if Amazon S3 is working again pic.twitter.com/aXKVh8YxUq — Bakery (@bakeryagency) February 28, 2017

3 Imgur was one of the services affected by the outage Credit: Imgur

During the outage, the internet giant said: "We're continuing to work to remediate the availability issues for Amazon S3 in US-EAST-1.

"AWS services and customer applications depending on S3 will continue to experience high error rates as we are actively working to remediate the errors in Amazon S3."

It later tweeted: "We believe we understand root cause and are working hard at repairing."

Amazon S3 is used by around 148,213 websites, and 121,761 unique domains, according to data tracked by SimilarTech.

Amazon's own operations was not affected.

Amazon has suffered brief outages before that have crippled Instagram, Vine, and IMDb.

AMAZON EXPLAINS WHAT S3 IS According to Amazon Web Service's website: Amazon Simple Storage Service is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon S3 has a simple web services interface that you can use to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

It is known for its reliability but because many websites rely on it any outage causes huge problems.

Amazon Web Services revenue for 2016 was $12.2 billion. It is reportedly the company’s most profitable division, according to an earnings report released earlier this month.