Amazon Web Services (AWS) has had a bad day.
That's how the boss of another big US tech firm Cloudflare put it – probably feeling very relieved that today's outage, hitting over 1,000 companies and affecting millions of internet users, had nothing to do with him.
The places hit by the outage vary significantly. It took out major social media platforms like Snapchat and Reddit, banks like Lloyds and Halifax, and games like Roblox and Fortnite.
AWS is a US giant with a large global footprint, having positioned itself as the backbone of the internet.
It provides tools and computers which enable around a third of the internet to work, it offers storage space and database management, it saves firms from having to maintain their own costly set-ups, and it also connects traffic to those platforms.
