AUSTIN (KXAN) -- "I woke up and it's like, **** hitting the fan, so to speak," said Stefanie Schappert about the October 20 Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that rippled through the internet. Apps were down. Websites stopped on an error screen. **** hit the fan.

AWS is the world's largest cloud service for hosting websites. A third of all websites on the internet use it. Everything from Snapchat to AT&T to McDonald's use AWS for their websites.

"Think of it like a giant toolbox that companies use. They will store data in it. They use it to operate their applications software, basically, so that they don't have to have the computers on site." said Schappert, a senior journalist with Cybernews.

Shortly after midnight on October 20, an issue with an AWS server in Virginia caused the outage

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