Amazon says a massive outage of its cloud computing service has been resolved as of Monday evening, after a problem disrupted internet use around the world, taking down a broad range of online services, including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming and financial platforms.

The all-day disruption and the ensuing exasperation it caused served as the latest reminder that 21st century society is increasingly dependent on just a handful of companies for much of its internet technology, which seems to work reliably until it suddenly breaks down.

About three hours after the outage began early Monday morning, Amazon Web Services said it was starting to recover, but it wasn’t until 6 p.m. Eastern that “services returned to normal operations,” Amazon said on its AWS health website, where it tracks outages.

Cybersecurity expert Mike Chapple said “a slow and bumpy recovery process” is “entirely normal.”

Amazon pinned the outage on issues related to its domain name system that converts web addresses into IP addresses, which are numeric designations that identify locations on the internet. Those addresses allow websites and apps to load on internet-connected devices.

Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages, said in a Facebook post that it received over 11 million user reports of problems at more than 2,500 companies. 

The Amazon division provides remote computing services to many apps, websites, governments, universities and companies. Early Monday, users reported issues with Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, online broker Robinhood, the McDonald’s app and many others, according to Downdetector.

Even Amazon’s own services weren’t immune. Users of the company’s Ring doorbell cameras and Alexa-powered smart speakers posted on DownDetector that they weren’t working, while others said they were unable to access the Amazon website or download books to their Kindle.

By mid-morning, Amazon said it had started to recover, but around 1 p.m. ET, users were still reporting problems. Thousands of Venmo users reported difficulties at about 1:30 p.m. ET, while people also reported problems with AI chatbot Claude, the Wall Street Journal and Amazon services like Alexa around the same time, according to Downdetector. 

Some companies and apps posted on social media to alert their users that the AWS outage was impacting their services. 

“An Amazon Web Services outage is impacting information in Transit app. The length of disruption is currently unknown. We apologize for any inconvenience,” said RTC Southern Nevada, the transit authority for the region, on X at 1:54 p.m. ET.

The outage also had ripple effects in the travel industry, with major airline carriers reporting issues.

A Southwest spokesperson said the outage affected the airline’s ability to efficiently dispatch some early morning flights, while United said it disrupted customers’ access to the United app and website overnight. Delta said the issue caused a small numbers of minor delays Monday morning.

The nation’s railroad services were also affected. Amtrak reported at 1:30 p.m. EDT that it was experiencing “intermittent technical difficulties” which hobbled SMS, email and push notifications, and prevented customers from booking reservations through Amtrak.com or the mobile app.

“If you are traveling today, please arrive at your station at your regularly scheduled time typically 30 minutes prior to your train’s departure,” Amtrak said in a statement shared with CBS News.

How did this start?

Amazon first reported the outage issue at 3:11 a.m. ET. Shortly after, it said its services in its eastern U.S. region were disrupted and engineers were working to understand what was causing the problem. At 5:27 a.m. ET, AWS began reporting progress, saying, “We are seeing significant signs of recovery.”

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