Why is the internet broken? How one small problem can take down the whole web

It started in a computer in northern Virginia, at around 3am local time . But just a few moments later it was everywhere.

When an Amazon data centre stopped working properly on Monday morning, so did much of the internet. For hours, users were unable to access many of the world’s most popular apps, platforms and services: everything from Snapchat to the UK’s tax authority were down.

The outage reflects the complex nature of today’s web: deeply intertwined with people’s lives, at once resilient and fragile. For critics, the dramatic, sudden and widespread nature of the incident shows that we rely too heavily on a small number of companies to power the internet, though the fact that it is so rare and was fixed so quickly also shows exactly how those companies were given that power in th