What to know about the Amazon cloud outage that exposed the internet's vulnerable backbone

A massive internet outage stemming from errors in Amazon cloud services on Monday morning demonstrated just how many people rely on the corporate behemoth's computational infrastructure everyday — and laid bare the vulnerabilities of an increasingly concentrated system.

What You Need To Know

An internet outage on Monday morning highlights the reliance on Amazon's cloud services, revealing vulnerabilities in the concentrated system

Cloud computing allows companies to rent Amazon's infrastructure instead of building their own

Amazon leads the market, followed by Google and Microsoft

The outage originated in Northern Virginia, the biggest and oldest cloud hub in the U.S. and the region that handles significantly more data than other hubs

But despite its omnipresence, most users don't kn