On Monday, millions of internet users got a painful answer to a question few even knew to exist. The question was: What do Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Signal, United and Delta airlines and countless other web-based sites and services have in common?

The answer is: They were all brought down by a cascading glitch at a data center in northern Virginia owned and operated by Amazon Web Services, an arm of the giant e-commerce company.

AWS is one of the top three cloud platforms, meaning that it holds its clients' data on its own servers and manages the transfer and transmission of that data within the client companies and between them and end users.

When AWS' northern Virginia data hub went down a few minutes before midnight Sunday, Pacific Daylight Time, 141 AWS services went dark, along w

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