NEW YORK – A major Amazon Web Services outage disrupted scores of online platforms Monday – leaving people around the world unable to access some banks, chatting apps, online food ordering and more.

History shows these kinds of system outages can be short-lived and are often minor inconveniences – such as placing a lunch order in person or waiting a few hours for a gaming platform to come back online – than long-term problems, but recovery can be a bumpy road. And for people trying to move money, communicate with loved ones or work using affected services, disruptions are especially stressful.

Consumers may not realize that many platforms they use rely on the same back-end technology. AWS is one of only a handful of major cloud service providers that businesses, governments, universities

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