The AWS outage brought much of the web to its knees: Here's how it happened, who it affected, and how much it might cost

Hundreds of applications and websites impacted by the AWS outage are now back online and operating as normal. However, questions still remain over the cost of the incident and a growing reliance on a select few cloud providers underpinning the digital economy.

Over the course of Monday morning through to the afternoon, services running on AWS struggled with outages, hitting websites but also payment services.

AWS said the incident was triggered by a DNS issue and that services were largely up and running by the afternoon, though a backlog of messages would take time to work through.

The incident follows last year's CrowdStrike outage and a similar outage by AWS in 2021 , highlighting our overreliance on digital systems and networks run by a few companies – a fact noted by many ind