The daily business briefing: March 1, 2017

Amazon cloud glitches disrupt thousands of websites, Penguin Random House wins auction to publish Obamas' books, and more

Barack and Michelle Obama speak in Washington, D.C.
(Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

1. Amazon Web Services glitch disrupts thousands of websites

Amazon's Simple Storage Service, or Amazon S3, suffered unspecified technical problems on Tuesday, disrupting cloud computing services to thousands of websites and apps. The outage lasted about three and a half hours. Amazon Web Services, by far the world's largest provider of internet-based computing services, announced near the end of the work day that S3 was "operating normally" again for the affected customers, who were in its eastern region. The breakdown underscored the importance of cloud services, and the potentially disproportionate impact of glitches when most businesses depend on just a few companies for remote storage of their images, customer data, commercial transactions, and other files.

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Harold Maass, The Week US

Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.