A glitch at an Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centre in the US left millions around the world unable to access half the internet, but how exactly did it cause the widespread disruption?

AWS recorded "increased error rates" yesterday evening that continued for more than 15 hours, affecting some of the most popular social media platforms, websites and online services.

It has been described as the largest disruption since the CrowdStrike outage of 2024 .

As services return to normal, here is everything we know about what caused yesterday's mammoth shutdown.

What is Amazon Web Services?

Let's start at basics.

AWS is a subsidiary of billionaire Jeff Bezos' Amazon and the world's most broadly adopted cloud service — a way of storing files and applications over the internet r

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