If you used the Internet at all on Monday, you probably noticed that a lot of things weren't working as well. Sites and services around the world experienced outages, including the likes of Facebook, McDonald's and even Fortnite. You may have already heard that the problems were caused by an AWS outage. However, if you don't know what AWS is, this explanation may not be entirely clear.
Amazon Web Services rules the Internet
AWS is a subsidiary of Amazon, short for Amazon Web Services. The company offers clients more than 200 cloud products.including applications for all of the following:
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Access to AWS services
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Analytics
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Application integration
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Blockchain
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Business applications
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Cloud financial management
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Calculate
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Customer support
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Containers
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Databases
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Developer Tools
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End-User Computing
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Web interface and mobile services
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Gaming technologies
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Internet of Things
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Machine learning and artificial intelligence
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Management and management
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Media
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Migration and transfer
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Network and Content Delivery
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Quantum technology
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Satellite
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Security, Identity and Compliance
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Storage
Beyond this list, it's important to understand why AWS matters. This service replaces the need for companies to purchase their own hardware for storage, networking and computing needs. Instead, companies can outsource these needs to AWS and adjust these services as those needs change. So, a company might start out hiring AWS to do a small amount of processing, but as the company grows, it might add more servers to its plan rather than investing in more processing hardware. This is known as cloud computing.
To meet global demand, AWS uses a large number of physical servers scattered around the world. Amazon says AWS has 120 “availability zones” in 38 regions around the world.— physical locations that have at least one data center with “redundant power, network and connectivity.” The idea is that having these physical data centers on different continents means your cloud computing is easier to scale up and better protected from failure, which is a bit ironic given today's events.
How much of the Internet runs on AWS?
In theory, cloud computing has many advantages. It can be much easier and more cost-effective for a company to rent AWS servers and technology to run its applications, store data, or process traffic. Thus, many world runs on AWS. According to HG InsightsAs of 2025, 4.19 million brick-and-mortar businesses use AWS. (There appears to be no data for customers without a physical address, so this number could be much higher.) Additionally, AWS is currently the largest cloud computing company on the market: the same report states that AWS has 30% of the market, while competitors like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have 20% and 12%, respectively.
Why AWS failure is such a big deal
With so many companies relying on your cloud computing to run their internet services, the risk of failure is high. Here's what we saw on Monday: AWS outages caused problems with many sites and services. If HG Insights is correct, this could affect up to 30% of businesses using some type of cloud computing service today. One analyst believes that the consequences of a failure could be billions of dollars in lost profits. It's unclear what the solution is, but it is clear that there is a danger in having much of the Internet rely on a single cloud hosting service.
