The internet fell apart Monday due to outages at a single company: Amazon Web Services, the world's largest cloud provider that powers many of the most popular apps and services we use.
People suddenly couldn't prepare for tests because their study tools were on Canva; they couldn't use their Amazon-owned Ring cameras; they couldn't send a Venmo payment; and a few couldn't even get their temperature-controlled mattresses to work.
Amazon's issue suddenly was all of our issue, too.
"Many of the apps, websites and devices people use daily, whether for shopping, entertainment, work, or even home automation, depend on it," said Feng Li, chair of information management at the Bayes Business School in City St George's University in London. "When AWS goes down, the impact cascades through multiple layers of dependency, reaching far beyond Amazon's own systems."
The reason so many companies rely on Amazon Web Services is because most companies have moved their data operations to the cloud.
These companies rent informational technology services like servers, networks and storage from a massive data center run by a few technology providers: typically Amazon Web Services, Microsoft or Google, explained Michael Chapple, a professor of IT, analytics, and operations at University of Notre Dame.
So when one Amazon data center goes down, as it did Monday, so do the thousands of companies that rely on it.
"Pretty much everything that uses IT services has some connection to the cloud," Chapple said. "So when you have one of these massive data centers having an outage, you're going to see effects all across the economy."
More than 1,000 companies were affected, including global banks, airlines, payment apps, and social media giants. Amazon said on its health dashboard that all of its services "returned to normal operations" as of about 6 p.m. ET on Monday.
Even though the disruption was over in less than a day, its widespread impact highlights just how many companies' day-to-day services are dependent on Amazon Web Services.
Here's a list of some of the biggest services that were affected Monday based on companies' own statements or reported internet disruptions from users:
As individual consumers, the first time we might learn about AWS is when we get an error message on our apps. "Most individuals don't really have any direct interaction with AWS," Chapple said. "When so many things don't work, you think it probably is you, because you don't suspect the entire internet is down."
But there are a few ways to do a quick check to see whether it's just you or a larger issue. You can visit Downdetector, a website that compiles user-submitted reports of disruptions to online services to see if the app you're using is affected. Or if it's a website, try dropping the site into Is It Down Right Now, a site that tests website availability directly. For Amazon Web Services, in particular, you can check its health dashboard.
Many companies also have an online status page that you can go to directly to check, often by simply typing "status" and a period before typing the company's main website. Peloton, for example, said on its status page that it had a "spike in errors across several Peloton services" related to the AWS outage Monday.
"The providers' status pages or their official social media feeds usually post updates faster than traditional news outlets," Li said.
It's smart to also have an internet backup plan and a tech money plan if you suddenly can't access your tech, because majors outages aren't a matter of if, they're a matter of when.
"I absolutely keep cash accessible to me, and I keep keys to my house accessible to me," Chapple said as an example of his own prep.
The last major Amazon-related internet outage, which affected Disney amusement parks and buying tickets online, was in 2021. Chapple said these technology provider-related outages are "fairly typical" and happen every one to two years.
"The goal should not be to eliminate outages, which is unrealistic, but to build greater transparency, redundancy, and accountability into the cloud ecosystem so that inevitable failures don't paralyze the system," Li said.