Slack, Snapchat, Signal and Perplexity were some of the affected apps and websites, among a host of big names. AWS offers cloud servers that allow these services, and millions of other websites and platforms, to run. AWS is a cloud-computing platform that provides the infrastructure underpinning much of the internet.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) had a bad day. That's how the boss of another big US tech firm Cloudflare put it – probably feeling very relieved that Monday's outage, hitting over 1,000 companies and affecting millions of internet users, had nothing to do with him.