Amazon has announced the gradual recovery of its cloud computing service following a significant outage that affected online activities worldwide on Monday.

The disruption impacted a wide range of users, as Amazon’s cloud service is integral to the operations of numerous apps, websites, government entities, universities, and businesses. According to Downdetector, a platform that monitors online outages, users experienced difficulties with popular platforms such as Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, and Robinhood, as well as the McDonald’s app, among many others.

The outage even extended to Amazon’s own services. Users reported issues with the company’s Ring doorbell cameras and Alexa smart speakers, as noted on DownDetector. Additionally, some users faced challenges accessing the Amazon website or downloading books to their Kindle devices.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provided updates on the situation, indicating that the disruptions primarily affected services in its eastern U.S. region. Their engineering team was actively investigating the root cause of the problem.

By 5:27 a.m. EDT, AWS communicated a positive development, stating, “We are seeing significant signs of recovery,” as services began to resume normal operations.

A little more than a half-hour later, it said, “We continue to observe recovery across most” of the affected services.

The recovery was echoed by other companies reliant on AWS, with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase posting at 5:33 a.m. that some of its users gaining access to the service after it had been unavailable due to the AWS outage. “All funds are safe,” Coinbase had noted earlier.

Many sites and apps tracked by Downdetector were showing significant reductions in reported issues at about 6:15 a.m. EDT.  

And at 6:35 a.m. EDT, AWS said, “The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now,” but said some requests might be slowed “while we work toward full resolution.”

Just before 7 a.m. EDT, that AWS site simply said, “No recent issues.”

Then, at 7:08 a.m. EDT AWS said it was “continuing to work towards full recovery” of various services.

AWS customers include some of the world’s biggest businesses and organizations.

“So much of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) compute companies who provide the underlying infrastructure that when there’s an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad range, a broad spectrum” of online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at U.K.-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.

“The world now runs on the cloud” and the internet is seen as a utility like water or electricity as we spend so much of our lives on our smartphones, Burgess said.

And because so much of the online world’s plumbing is underpinned by a handful of companies, when something goes wrong “it’s very difficult for users to pinpoint what is happening because we don’t see Amazon, we just see Snapchat or Roblox,” Burgess said.