Amazon's AWS outage meant big problems for large swaths of the internet. What have we learned in the past 24 hours?

Experts say the incident revealed what can happen when a such a broad spectrum of companies rely on singular cloud provider.

The internet fell apart Monday due to outages at a single company: Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud provider that powers many of the most popular apps and services we use.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on Monday made global headlines after knocking some of the world's largest sites offline for hours. For users, the impacts ranged from the serious - such as not being able to access vital banking, government or work services - to the not-so-serious, such as fears of losing long built-up streaks on Duolingo.

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.

Some customers who were unable to fill or pick up their prescriptions at CVS locations on Tuesday because of technical issues may want to go back to the pharmacy.