By Micah Maidenberg

Amazon.com Inc. reported an outage tied to its enormous cloud-computing operation that affected many customers.

On a website for Amazon Web Services business, the company said it was experiencing errors that were causing issues for a range of cloud-software programs in its region covering the eastern part of the U.S.

Businesses warned customers on Twitter that their products were facing problems due to the outage.

Roku Inc., behind its namesake streaming devices, said it had been affected by the outage. Insteon, which sells products for homes like thermostats and fan controllers, said in a tweet that Alexa voice commands for one of its hub systems may fail due to the outage.

The Chicago Tribune said in a tweet it would post news updates to social-media sites because it is "experiencing intermittent issues with our website and publishing system because of the AWS outage." Operations at The Wall Street Journal were affected.

Cloud-computing services have become more pivotal during the coronavirus pandemic as many companies have embraced remote hardware and software services to allow employees to work from home.

Just before noon on the East Coast, Amazon said a programming interface for its Kinesis Data Streams product was "severely impaired," according to the Amazon Web Services website. Kinesis is able to capture gigabytes of data each second from websites, financial transactions, social-media feeds and other digital locations, according to the company.

In a statement, Amazon said the Kinesis product had been experiencing increased error rates for its east region, affecting some other services in the cloud unit. "We are working toward resolution," a spokeswoman said.

Some of the problems with the cloud-based software were tied to Northern Virginia, according to the Amazon Web Services website.

Amazon has long been the leader in the business of renting out cloud-computing infrastructure. More recently, it has faced fresh challenges from Microsoft Corp., as well as Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Oracle Corp.

Microsoft and Google in recent months also have suffered issues with their cloud services.

Write to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

11-25-20 1306ET