Experts say outages like the one that Amazon experienced this week are almost inevitable given the complexity and scale of cloud technology—but the duration serves as a warning.

When Amazon Web Services suffered an outage on Monday morning, it practically took down the internet with it. There went all of Amazon’s services, from its shopping hub to its Ring doorbell cameras. ChatGPT went quiet. “Smart” mattresses became unsleepable. Video games like Fortnite blinked out, as did platforms like Snapchat and banking apps.

Debate whether companies have become too dependent on AWS and its peers, especially when virtually all the in-demand AI services we're banking on are hosted in these clouds. Play another game of Faker or Breaker with three companies impacted by the AWS outage.

Slack, Snapchat, Signal and Perplexity were some of the affected apps and websites, among a host of big names. AWS offers cloud servers that allow these services, and millions of other websites and platforms, to run. AWS is a cloud-computing platform that provides the infrastructure underpinning much of the internet.

Amazon Web Services is recovering after an outage that disrupted Facebook, Snapchat, Fortnite, Coinbase and other major platforms, once again illustrating the internet’s heavy reliance on the cloud giant and a lack of redundancy in online services.

A major AWS outage Monday morning caused problems with many of the largest sites on the internet for several hours. And it's not the first time.

Amazon Web Services says its massive outage has been resolved, but the ripple effects are still raising alarms across the digital economy.

The outage underscored a central trade-off of cloud computing: while it lets businesses deploy global services without maintaining vast infrastructure, it concentrates risk. A problem in a single region—like Northern Virginia—can cause widespread, simultaneous outages for unrelated companies worldwide.