The turmoil marked the largest internet disruption since last year's CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports.

Amazon's cloud services unit AWS was struggling to recover on Monday from a widespread outage that knocked out thousands of websites along with some of the world's most popular apps - Snapchat and Reddit - and disrupted businesses globally.

“Today’s outage shows how concentrated power makes the internet fragile and this lack of resilience hits our economies as a result,” technologist Robin Berjon said in an email. Berjon co-founded the Eurostack project — an initiative campaigning to make Europe self-reliant in digital services.

How Amazon’s most important cloud region became critical to daily online life, and why even a brief disruption can have global effects.

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