Disruptions continued to plague Amazon’s cloud services unit AWS on Monday as it struggled to recover from a widespread global outage that took down thousands of websites.

Some applications were gradually coming back online but AWS acknowledged that elevated errors were still affecting services.

Ed Amoroso is an NYU research professor and compared the difficult recovery to a pilot trying to manage a midair crisis.

"The first thing you do is fly the plane. So the first thing they need to do is get their arms around their systems and get them operational. Then at that point, you sort of, the pilot would say navigate, you make sure that you've got a good plan. And that's when you start to communicate out what the issues were, what the problems are. My guess is they're somewhere between getting their arms around this and then starting their plan for further fixes and for avoidance.”

Amoroso said there did not appear to be any malicious activity related to the outage.

AWS said the issue originated from within its EC2 internal network.

EC2 refers to Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud" service, which provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS.

Businesses use EC2 to run virtual servers that they need to develop, launch and host applications, and can scale up or down on capacity as required.

Amoroso said these services are appealing because the costs are low and the service levels are high, but that comes with tradeoffs.

"The bad thing is the proverbial all your eggs in one basket. So when you do have, you know, your business running, say, on Microsoft or running on Amazon, you know, you knock wood every day hoping that things are going to be okay? [flash] So we live in an era right now where we are very dependent on the cloud providers. So we need them to be at the top of their game. And today, Amazon was not.”

Monday's outage took down some of the world's most popular apps, including Snapchat and Reddit.

Amazon's own services, including its shopping website, Prime Video and Alexa, were also hit.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.

Posted by: AAngeles