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 latest outage serves as a reminder of how fragile the internet’s backbone can be, even if the disruption is brief, and how reliant the world has become on these online services.The root cause of Monday’s outage remains unknown, but a service that converts friendly web names into IP addresses was unable to communicate with thousands of companies’ massive databases hosted by Amazon. Is internet services becoming more unreliable as usage grows?

