A massive outage at Amazon's cloud computing service disrupted apps and websites around the world Monday, leaving customers and businesses feeling the effects.

Amazon Web Services said the outage, which started early in the morning, was resolved by Monday evening.

Here's what we know about what happened.

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services is Amazon's cloud services unit, which provides digital services to companies, governments and individuals.

Shion Guha, p rofessor of human-centred data science at the University of Toronto, says when most people think about Amazon, they think about its online store or Prime Video, but AWS is where the company makes a lot of its money.

Guha said businesses seek out AWS for its centralized network of servers and other distributed software products.

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