Since a large portion of the internet depends on AWS, the outage cascaded across major firms in disparate industries, leaving some people unable to access airline information or make everyday purchases, Qi Liao, a professor of computer science at Central Michigan University, told ABC News.

Monday’s Amazon Web Services outage — and the global disruption it caused — underscored just how reliant the internet has become on a small number of core infrastructure providers.

Frequency combs split laser light into dozens of colors that each represent their own optical channel, allowing for faster data transmission. Although this typically requires expensive and powerful lasers and amplifiers, a new study details how scientists accidentally found a way to achieve the same effect on a single chip.

AT&T Inc. added more mobile phone and home internet subscribers this summer than analysts expected, amid a heavy promotional push to keep competitive pressure on its two main rivals.