Many websites affected by widespread Amazon Web Services outage

WASHINGTON — Amazon’s cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, experienced an outage Tuesday affecting publishers who suddenly found themselves unable to operate their sites as former President Donald Trump appeared in court in Miami.

The company said on its website that the root cause of the issue was tied to a function called AWS Lambda, which lets customers run code for different types of applications.

Amazon said it was experiencing error rates for multiple AWS services in an availability zone based in Northern Virginia. Patrick Neighorn, a company spokesperson, declined to provide additional details about the outage.

The outage was first confirmed shortly after 3 p.m.