WASHINGTON — Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage early Monday morning , cutting off access to many of the internet's most popular websites for hours.

The problem appeared to be largely resolved Monday, until reports of problems accessing websites spiked again around 10 a.m. By noon, at least some services appeared to be restored, but the outages show how the technology underpins the vast majority of the internet, and how AWS failures can lead to major problems across the globe.

Amazon Web Services, commonly referred to as AWS, is a cloud computing platform owned and operated by Amazon.

In layman's terms, AWS is a cloud host, like a much more powerful Google Drive or Squarespace, where companies can deploy their websites and programs without having to pay for expensive servers

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