Thousands of websites and apps like Snapchat, Roblox, Ring and more were down or experiencing issues Monday morning as a major cloud computing service went offline .

The errors began just after 12 a.m., when Amazon Web Services said it was "investigating increased error rates and latencies" for multiple sites.

But what is AWS, which sites were down and how long could it take to fix the problem?

Here's what to know:

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing service.

"Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provide

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