EXPLAINER: What caused Amazon’s outage? Will there be more?

By MATT O’BRIEN and FRANK BAJAK
AP Technology Writers

Robotic vacuum cleaners wouldn’t start. Doorbell cameras stopped watching for package thieves, though some of those deliveries were canceled anyway. Netflix and Disney movies got interrupted and The Associated Press had trouble publishing the news. A major outage in Amazon’s cloud computing network on Dec. 7 severely disrupted services at a wide range of U.S. companies for hours, raising questions about the vulnerability of the internet. Amazon has still said nothing about what, exactly, went wrong. Some cybersecurity experts have warned for years about the potentially ugly consequences of having key internet operations dominated by a handful of big tech companies.