Monday’s Amazon Web Services outage wasn’t just another tech hiccup.

It was a stark – and for many people, incredibly frustrating – reminder of how fragile our digital world has become. The outage impacted millions of users globally, including in Australia, knocking over everything from Snapchat to banking apps, from Fortnite to Tinder, from Ring doorbells to cryptocurrency exchanges. Amazon’s own website and its voice assistant Alexa were crippled.

For hours, vast swaths of the internet simply vanished.

Amazon’s internal systems also went offline, with warehouse workers reportedly told to stand by in break rooms, while their pay app stopped working.

The culprit was a problem with Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing unit of tech giant Amazon. To understand why this matters, it’s

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