For many users around the globe, the week started with no access to their most used apps and sites after Amazon Web Services (AWS) was struck by an outage.
On Monday morning, October 20, several sites and services, including Snapchat, Venmo, Ring, Facebook and banking apps, were down temporarily.
What is Amazon Web Services (AWS) ?
Owned by Amazon, AWS is a cloud services provider that hosts many of the world's most-used online services.
It was created after Amazon realised it needed excess server capacity for enough computing power to handle the massive amounts of traffic on its site during the holiday season.
During the rest of the year, the tech giant noted that it could use those servers to support other companies' online needs.
Among AWS' many features is DynamoDB, a database that hosts information for companies, including customer data.
On Monday morning, Amazon said that its customers could not access the data stored in DynamoDB because the Domain Name System (DNS) had encountered a problem.
DNS acts like an internet location engine, converting user-friendly web addresses like amazon.com into IP addresses, a series of numbers that other websites and applications can understand.
Just after midnight on October 20, AWS registered an issue on its service status page, noting that it was "investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-East-1 Region."
After two hours, it was revealed that they had identified the root cause of the issue, and within half an hour, it had started applying mitigations that were resulting in significant signs of recovery.
By 7 a.m., most apps and banking services were back online; however, a number of Snapchat, Reddit and other app users were still unable to access their favourite services.
