A widespread Amazon Web Services outage exposed how much daily life depends on one cloud provider, disrupting hospitals, teachers, banking and smart-home devices while rippling through restaurants. Analysts said AWS’s dominance means failures cascade, with one estimate putting the impact in the billions. In Indiana, appointment software, payment systems and home cameras faltered; a restaurant comped a meal before salvaging transactions through a Toast terminal. In the Houston area, a business owner lost online orders, couldn’t verify insurance at clinics, and missed rent via Venmo. The episode renewed worries about concentrating critical services with a few tech giants.

Prepared by Jonathan Pierce and reviewed by editorial team.