On Monday, an issue with Amazon's computational infrastructure caused an outage that went way beyond impacting the internet giant's online shopping website.

The AWS outage had wide-ranging global impacts, affecting some healthcare services, banks and air travel as well as disrupting popular apps such as Snapchat and Reddit.

So what caused the outage, and why was it such a big deal?

What is AWS?

AWS stands for Amazon Web Services, which is a subsidiary of Amazon that offers speciality technology services to clients across the globe.

"It's one of the world's largest cloud computing platforms ," University of Queensland's Cyber Research Centre director Ryan Ko says.

"Instead of every company owning and maintaining their own physical computer servers, AWS lets them rent computing

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