Amazon Web Services logo is displayed at a conference. The service went down for several hours Monday. Noah Berger/AWS/Reuters New York —

An outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing platform that powers much of the internet, went down for several hours Monday, making several major websites and apps inoperable.

From banking services to social networks to airline booking sites to online shopping, thousands of services were disrupted as millions of people worldwide – many of whom were on their way to work on the US East Coast – were unable to mobile-order coffee or access key apps.

The latest outage serves as a reminder of how fragile the internet’s backbone can be, even if the disruption is brief, and how reliant the world has become on these online services.

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