Amazon hasn't explained exactly what went wrong or offered an estimated time of repair, although its status page has narrowed the outage down to a North Virginia location. We've asked Amazon for more info and will let you know if it can share additional details.

No matter what's at fault or how long the outage goes on, the incident underscores a mounting problem: an increasing dependence on a handful of services to power large swaths of the internet. AWS and its rivals make cloud features viable for companies that can't always afford to run their own servers, but they also increase the chances that a failure will affect many people. Unless the tech industry can find a way to diversify its online data sources, these internet-wide crises aren't going away any time soon.