What is AWS and How Did It Bring Down Instagram?

[UPDATE: As of late Saturday afternoon, Instagram appeared to have much of its functionality restored for most users.]

Instagram has been insta-tripping since Friday night and here’s why: A powerful storm in northern Virginia took out the servers it runs on.

Maybe you’re wondering how a storm on the East Coast killed access to your favorite photo sharing app, which is based in San Francisco. That’s because Instagram, like many major web companies, uses an even bigger web company — Amazon — to host its traffic and data.

An enterprise cloud-computing product called Amazon Web Services (AWS) powers businesses in 190 countries worldwide — “hundreds of thousands” of startups and mat…
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