How the AWS outage wreaked havoc across the U.S.

Robotic vacuum cleaners couldn’t be summoned. Whole Foods orders were suddenly canceled. Parts of Amazon’s mammoth retail operation slowed to a standstill. 

Amazon Web Services, the leading provider of cloud infrastructure technology for businesses large and small, was hit with a historic, hourslong outage on Tuesday. Popular websites and heavily used services were knocked offline, angering users and underscoring the severity of problems that can arise from having so much economic activity reliant on technology from just a few vendors.

AWS controlled 33% of the global cloud infrastructure market in the second quarter, according to Synergy Research Group, followed by Microsoft at 20% and Google at 10%. Revenue at AWS jumped 39% in the third quarter from a year earlier to $16.1 billion, outpacing growth of 15% across all of Amazon.

Tuesday’s outage began around 11 a.m. ET and was mostly resolved by Tuesday night. Amazon confirmed that service issues with AWS’ main US-East-1 region, located in Northern Virginia, were causing problems for its warehouse and delivery network. The company hasn’t said what caused the outage.