While most of America was sleeping, there was a major, worldwide disruption to Amazon Web Services, knocking out websites, phones apps and online sales.

A major outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) led to widespread disruptions across numerous websites and applications globally. The incident affected a range of businesses, including social media, online gaming, payment services, and airlines, with many experiencing service interruptions and delays.

Amazon reported that the underlying issue was resolved, but some companies continued to face problems throughout the day. The event highlights the dependence of modern digital infrastructure on a small number of cloud service providers and the potential ripple effects when one experiences technical difficulties.

Major apps, websites disrupted by Amazon Web Services outage

while most of America was sleeping, there was a major worldwide disruption of Internet service, which many of us discovered when we woke up this morning, it knocked out websites, phone apps and online sales. So what happened? Kelly O. Grady reports. The fault lies not in the stars, but in the cloud. Amazon's cloud service called AWS went down across the country, causing websites and apps to stop working. The cloud is the digital backbone of the modern Internet. AWS is a $100 billion business that provides everything from data storage to security for millions of customers. For example, instead of building and maintaining their own physical servers, companies instead rent from AWS. Organizations, large and small, rely on the tech giant. Today's outage impacted businesses, including social media app Facebook, online gaming platform Roblox and payment service Venmo. Companies like Delta Airlines and McDonald's also experienced delays. Now, Amazon said early this morning the underlying issue had been fixed, but throughout the day, all kinds of companies, including airlines and Amtrak, continued to report problems. So Kelly seems so mysterious here. Do we have any idea at this point what caused it? So when you're using an app or a website, it collects data from a server. In this case, your app and the Amazon Web Services server couldn't communicate. Think of it as if you're trying to contact a specific person and you don't have the right phone number. So it affected a broad variety of businesses. What does this say about how vulnerable we are? Look, we live in a digital world. Companies rely on the cloud. I think the takeaway here is when you have so few major cloud companies, even just when one glitches, it causes a ripple effect. So my takeaway, if you normally log into an app to get information you need, have a backup that's handy and maybe have some cash on hand. Always the backup. Kelly, thank you.

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Breakdown