Last night, several users began reporting problems accessing some of the major sites that rely on Amazon's cloud-based network. The affected sites and services included Instagram, Netflix and Vine along with several others. Some completely blacked out where as others suffered from serious slow down.

According to reports, the problem was traced back to a malfunctioning network device at a data center in Northern Virginia that was struggling to keep up with demand. Although details are thin, it looks as though the issues hit databases, core computer code and the software that pushes various queries across the servers. After the hiccup was resolved, Amazon issued a statement saying the problems were caused by a "partial failure of a networking device," but offered no further details.

Starting at around 4pm EST yesterday, Americans began experiencing an assortment of issues from page load problems to content update lag. The issues lasted several hours before being resolved.

The affected services eventually issued public warning messages across their social network pages. Instagram was the first to do so via Twitter: "We know many of you are having trouble loading Instagram. We identified the issue and are working to fix it ASAP. Thanks for holding on." Along with cloud company Heroku and automation service IFTTT, to name a few, AirBnB tweeted that it was also one of the sites suffering from issues due to an Amazon server glitch.

The issues come barely a week after Amazon's North American store-front went dead for more than 30 minutes.