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You never know the value of something until it’s gone, they say.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage caused many services — from streaming and e-commerce sites to financial and healthcare platforms — to simply vanish. My small inconveniences — a language app streak or missing a fitness class because the booking app went down — were nothing compared to many who had suffered serious losses. For example, customers of $2,000 “smart beds” that got too hot or stuck. Someone even had access to drinking water cut off. The loss has been put at over $11 billion in lost revenue and market value.

And as I write this, reports are trickling in that parts of Microsoft Azure have gone down affecting Office 365 and X-Box Live services. Combined, AWS and Azure control an estimated 55 percent of the cloud computing market.

It would appear that cloud-computing is a fragile beast. Its metaphor invokes the omnipresence and unyielding power of the sky, with thunder and lightning being the most primordial forces in human experience. Clouds, we also know, are nothing more than water vapour and can vanish without trace.

What is AWS?