Many customers of leading accounting software house MYOB were left hanging yesterday after the company was among a number of large outfits hit by problems at Amazon Web Services.

The problems started at 7.42am Sydney time and most were finally resolved by 1 pm, but this wiped out vital morning-hour calculations at many MYOB customers.

Earlier the day AWS advised that its relational database service hosted in Sydney was suffering “increased create times and cluster unavailability”.

MYOB reported that 40 of its services were down, with only two up and at least 211 customers, many of them corporate subscriptions, affected “Our service provider, AWS, is currently experiencing a database outage,” the company said in an advisory.

“Most customers will be unable to access their sites until the issue has been resolved with AWS.”

AWS said it had started to see “recovery for some clusters” around 11.30am and everything fixed by 1.32pm probably ending a number of long lunches with a call back to business.