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.

Widespread internet outages were reported early on Monday, taking down popular services including Snapchat, Fortnite and Roblox, as Amazon Web Services said there was an issue they were working to mitigate.

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.

Amazon Web Services, a major provider of cloud hosting that underpins much of the web and everyday online tools, went offline because of a problem with one its core database products.

Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing service run by Amazon, experienced a significant outage that disrupted numerous websites on Oct. 20.

The outage affected websites like Coinbase and Fortnite, and disrupted services like Signal, Zoom, and Amazon's own products, including Ring.

An outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing platform that powers much of the internet, went down for several hours Monday, making several major websites and apps inoperable.

A major outage caused by an issue at Amazon Web Services affected hundreds of websites, games and apps, including Amazon, Snapchat, Fortnite and several banks. Amazon says it fixed the underlying problem but a full recovery will take longer.