By Greg Bensinger, Deborah Mary Sophia (Reuters) -Amazon.com investors drove shares down sharply on Thursday due to weakness in the retailer's cloud computing unit and lower-than-expected forecasts for first-quarter revenue and profit.

Amazon shares slid after the online-retail and cloud-services giant offered a first-quarter outlook that came up short of Wall Street’s expectations while forecasting bumpy trends in its cloud business.

AWS has not been able to match the growth of Amazon’s competitors, with Microsoft Corp.’s Azure and Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud seeing cloud-related revenue rise by 31% and 30%, respectively. Even so, AWS remains much bigger than any other cloud infrastructure provider, and it’s notable that those peers also missed expectations this week.