India, Oct. 23 -- For several hours ealier this week, on Monday, large parts of the global Internet went offline following a major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing arm of Amazon that powers much of the world's online infrastructure. The disruption revealed how deeply dependent modern businesses, governments, and consumers have become on a handful of cloud service providers, and how quickly an unexpected technical failure can ripple across the world.

The outage began at approximately 07:11 GMT and affected more than a thousand online services. Major websites and applications such as WhatsApp, Snapchat, Reddit, and several British government portals, including entertainment and tax services, experienced severe disru...