An Amazon Web Services outage has caused significant issues for a number of high-profile websites Monday morning, including Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, online broker Robinhood and the McDonald’s app.

But just what is AWS? AWS is a widely used cloud platform that offers more than 200 services including cloud-based computing power, storage and databases for IT infrastructure.

Instead of maintaining their own servers and IT infrastructure, companies purchase these cloud-based tools from providers like AWS to run websites and the functions on them. In cloud computing, these services are paid for as they're used, which is often less expensive than physical infrastructure.

Monday's issues were reported in the US-EAST-1 region. According to its website, AWS has 120 availability zones across 38

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