A Domain Name System error that originated from Amazon's largest and oldest data center took down major sites Monday. The outage has been resolved.

On Monday afternoon, Amazon confirmed that an outage affecting Amazon Web Services’ cloud hosting had been resolved, impacting millions across the Internet.

A DNS server – short for Domain Name System server – helps your web browser connect to the internet and load websites properly.

DNS stands for Domain Name System, commonly referred to as the internet’s phonebook. It is the system computers use to connect to each other when we go online.

A massive internet outage caused disruptions to many of the world's largest internet sites, banks, streaming and gaming services

How Amazon’s most important cloud region became critical to daily online life, and why even a brief disruption can have global effects.

Maybe we rely on Amazon Web Services a little too much. Dozens of sites and apps went dark this morning. Here's why.

Still, Amazon said some AWS services had a backlog of messages that would take a few hours to process. AWS hosts applications and computer processes for companies around the world, and the disruption knocked workers from London to Tokyo offline and halted others from conducting normal everyday tasks like paying hairdressers or changing their airline tickets.