The internet was hit by an hours-long outage that took down many of the world’s biggest apps and services in Monday.

Snapchat, Slack, Fortnite and Roblox were all taken offline during the technical problems, which began early in the morning and lasted through much of the day.

Soon after it began, the problem was traced to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) facility that appeared to have undergone problems. The company said that the issues were related to a data centre in northern Virginia, and the problem was with the domain name system, which works as the internet’s phone book.

AWS provides the infrastructure of much of the internet, meaning that even a relatively small technical issue can take down huge platforms that might not obviously be connected to Amazon. It is the largest company

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