Roblox, Fortnite and Snapchat working again after worldwide internet outage

Many of the world's largest websites and apps - including Roblox, Fortnite and Snapchat - are working again after a massive internet service issue on Monday.

More than 1000 companies and 6.5 million users around the world reported problems getting their apps and websites to work, according to Downdetector, a website that monitors internet outages.

The problem was down to an important internet company called Amazon Web Services (AWS) that lots of other web-based services rely on.

This included big gaming platforms like Fortnite, Roblox, PlayStation Network and Pokémon Go.

Some banks, including Lloyds, Halifax and the Bank of Scotland, also experienced problems, with some people reporting not being able to pay for things or log into their account.

However, on Monday night, Amazon Web Services said it had fixed the issue that knocked some of the world's largest websites offline for much of the day.

Many of the apps and websites affected during the big outage run using Amazon Web Services (AWS).

You might not have heard of it before, but AWS is the world's largest cloud computing platform - around a third of the internet relies on it to run - and is owned by Amazon.

On Monday morning, Amazon Web Services reported that an IT problem was affecting services at their Virginia data centre in the US.

Soon after this, reports from all over the world came through that apps and websites using AWS were also experiencing issues.

AWS announced that their engineers were working hard to find and fix the issue as quickly as possible.

By 11:20 (GMT) they said most services should be working again:

"We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered.

We continue to work towards full resolution and will provide updates as we have more information to share."

The UK government issues a statement in the morning saying: "We are aware of an incident affecting Amazon Web Services and several online services which rely on their infrastructure.

"Through our established incident response arrangements, we are in contact with the company, who are working to restore services as quickly as possible."

By around 16:00 GMT on 20 October, Amazon Web Services said it had fixed the main problem which had disrupted many of the world's biggest websites and apps, but it also said that a full recovery would take some more time and investigation.

"We continue to investigate the root cause for the network connectivity issues that are impacting AWS services," they said.

At around 2300 BST, Amazon said all AWS services had "returned to normal operations."

A lot of people were surprised to find out that so much of the internet relies on just one company for it to work properly.

There are other companies, like Microsoft Azure, Google and IBM, but it's fair to say Amazon is the biggest cloud computing provider for the internet.

Companies could run their own cloud service, but they are very expensive and complicated to run, which is why many choose the simple and straightforward option to use a cloud service that already exists.

However, problems like this show how it can have a huge effect on people's daily lives around the world.