Early on Monday morning, a major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage shook the internet, knocking several high-traffic websites and apps offline. The issue began at about 3:00 a.m. ET, primarily affecting the US, East- 1 region, AWS’s largest and busiest data center in Northern Virginia. The outage was the result of a DNS (Domain Name System) resolution problem on one of its internal network subsystems, Amazon said. This led multiple servers from establishing a proper connection, impacting a wide range of cloud based online services that depend on the AWS cloud infrastructure. Though the matter was said to be fully addressed by about 5:30 a.m. ET, consumers were still complaining of slow loading, login failures, and connectivity failures for hours after the initial reports. The impact was widespread. Platforms such as Snapchat, Signal, Fortnite, and Ring were just a few of the many that were affected. Even Amazon’s own websites like Alexa, Prime Video, and the main Amazon retail site had pauses or were slow to load. Since AWS powers much of the modern internet, the outage rippled out to affect industries as wide ranging as entertainment and communication to finance and trade. Amazon assured that the downtime was not a result of cyberattack, but due to a technical glitch within its internal infrastructure. The engineers of the company worked quickly in isolating the issue and returning to normal operations. Most of the major platforms returned to their normal functionality by Monday morning, though AWS was still observing for residual impact. The outage is a reminder of how dependent the World wide web has grown on a small collective of cloud providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. With one network down, tens of millions of users and network down, tens of millions of users and businesses can suddenly be offline. AWS has requested customers to track live updates on its Service Health Dashboard, where engineers are posting recovery notes and status updates. Until now, most of the systems seem to be recovering, but the event reflects a trend developing in the technology industry,  when one company’s infrastructure carries so much of the web, even a minor outage can produce worldwide disruptions.