WASHINGTON — Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage early Monday morning , cutting off access to many of the internet's most popular websites for hours.

While the problem has largely been resolved, the outage shows how the technology underpins the vast majority of the internet, and how AWS failures can lead to major problems across the globe.

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services, commonly referred to as AWS, is a cloud computing platform owned and operated by Amazon.

In layman's terms, AWS is a cloud host, like a much more powerful Google Drive or Squarespace, where companies can deploy their websites and programs without having to pay for expensive servers and physical infrastructure. Instead, they pay a monthly subscription fee to Amazon to use their services instead.

It offers c

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