NEW YORK — Amazon posted higher fiscal third quarter profit and sales compared with a year ago, fueled by accelerating growth in its cloud computing business and strong spending by its customers looking for low prices at a time when inflation is resurging.

A problem at Amazon’s cloud computing service disrupted internet use around the world. The outage on Monday took down a broad range of online services, including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming and financial platforms.

Amazon's cloud computing division delivered the goods in the third quarter, reporting $33.0 billion in sales for a 20% year-over-year growth rate that investors had been itching to see. The latest performance blew past consensus expectations and marks an acceleration from the June quarter's 17.

After unexpectedly strong sales and profits across its consumer and cloud businesses, the tech giant said another strong quarter might be ahead.

The Seattle-based company's profits jumped nearly 39%, driven by AWS’s robust growth and accelerating AI-linked demand.

A massive internet outage stemming from errors in Amazon cloud services on Monday morning demonstrated just how many people rely on the corporate behemoth's computational infrastructure everyday — and laid bare the vulnerabilities of an increasingly concentrated system.

Experts say the incident revealed what can happen when a such a broad spectrum of companies rely on singular cloud provider.

Amazon's AWS is the dominant cloud computing business, but some on Wall Street are concerned that the company isn't as competitive when it comes to artificial-intelligence workloads. Thus, all eyes will be on AWS's growth in the third quarter,