Amazon Web Services experienced DNS resolution issues on Monday morning, taking down wide swaths of the web—and highlighting a long-standing weakness in the internet's infrastructure.

Amazon Web Services, a major provider of cloud hosting that underpins much of the web and everyday online tools, went offline because of a problem with one its core database products.

Monday’s Amazon Web Services outage — and the global disruption it caused — underscored just how reliant the internet has become on a small number of core infrastructure providers.

The outage underscored a central trade-off of cloud computing: while it lets businesses deploy global services without maintaining vast infrastructure, it concentrates risk. A problem in a single region—like Northern Virginia—can cause widespread, simultaneous outages for unrelated companies worldwide.

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Since a large portion of the internet depends on AWS, the outage cascaded across major firms in disparate industries, leaving some people unable to access airline information or make everyday purchases, Qi Liao, a professor of computer science at Central Michigan University, told ABC News.

A major outage caused by an issue at Amazon Web Services affected hundreds of websites, games and apps, including Amazon, Snapchat, Fortnite and several banks. Amazon says it fixed the underlying problem but a full recovery will take longer.

BBC Sport's Ask Me Anything team explains why the Amazon Web Services global outage affected Brentford's win over West Ham