Major apps are crashing and websites are slow - and it's all connected to Amazon Web Services' massive outage. Here's what's behind the internet's bad day.

A Domain Name System error that originated from Amazon's largest and oldest data center took down major sites Monday. The outage has been resolved.

How Amazon’s most important cloud region became critical to daily online life, and why even a brief disruption can have global effects.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing platform that powers much of the internet, went down for several hours Monday, making several major websites and apps inoperable.

The outage comes four years after an hours-long malfunction in US-EAST-1 that likewise took numerous third-party services offline. Similarly to today’s disruption, the incident began with DNS errors. AWS engineers later determined that the outage was caused by one of its cloud services’ autoscaling engine.

AWS provides on-demand computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms that rely on its cloud infrastructure.