Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud provider, resolved the issues that plagued its services for about 15 hours on Monday, an episode that highlighted how much of the internet is dependent on the operations of a single company.

In an update on its service health dashboard, the Amazon.com Inc. unit said all of its services “returned to normal operations” as of about 6 p.m. New York time.

AWS services — data storage, computing power, and other building blocks — underpin a large chunk of the internet, accounting for about a third of the cloud market. Downdetector tracked disruptions at hundreds of sites, including for financial services outfits Venmo and Robinhood Markets Inc., Apple Inc.’s music and TV offerings, software companies such as Zoom Communications Inc., Salesforce Inc. and Snowflake Inc., food-services giants including McDonald’s Corp. and gaming companies like Epic Games Inc. Even Amazon’s own services, including Alexa and the Ring home security system, weren’t immune.

Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist with Duckbill, which advises businesses on their cloud spending, said Monday’s outage was likely the worst for AWS since a major disruption in December 2021. “The question is, is this the big one? Or is it that now we are more interconnected” and dependent on Amazon, he said.

AWS earlier said a digital directory for a key database service malfunctioned, causing cascading failures when software reliant on the widely used data trove was unable to retrieve information. By early Monday New York time, the company said it had identified and fixed the underlying issue, which hit its operations on the U.S. East Coast, AWS’s largest cluster of data centers.

But as the company worked to fix that issue, engineers found that other subsystems — including one necessary for customers to launch new rented servers — had been hit by the database outage.

Most glitches on major tech systems are fixed quickly. Still, interconnected technology systems have meant that problems at one company can cause catastrophic impacts across the global economy. Last year, a faulty software update at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. grounded flights and crashed systems around the world, causing billions of dollars in damages.

Amazon’s 2021 outage affected everything from Disney amusement parks and Netflix videos to robot vacuums and Adele ticket sales. A few days after the incident, Amazon said an automated computer program designed to make its network more reliable caused a “large number” of its systems to unexpectedly behave strangely. That, in turn, created a surge of activity on AWS networks, ultimately preventing users from accessing some of its services. A smaller outage hit the cloud provider later that month.

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