Amazon.com, the website of the world's largest online retailer, went down for about 15 minutes on Monday in a rare outage for users across the United States and Canada. Amazon.com did not provide any details about the reason of the outage.

Earlier on Monday, users from the U.S. and Canada got only error messages when trying to access the popular shopping website.

"Oops! We're very sorry," alongside a "500 Service Unavailable Error" report.

The incident follows Google's two-minute downtime on Friday. That affected the firm's main search page as well as its Gmail email service, YouTube video site and Drive storage product.

Microsoft's Outlook.com and the New York Times website have also faced problems

Microsoft blamed a three-day-long disruption to its email product on a failure in its "caching" temporary storage service. It said this "resulted in a flood of traffic that our services did not handle properly".

The New York Times has said that an "internal issue" with its servers meant that the newspaper became unavailable for two hours on Wednesday.