It was shortly after 8am in London when the British government's websites began to flicker and fade.

Most of America was asleep, but a few night owls on the East Coast found their Disney streaming services stall.

Those calling Lyfts to get home from a Sunday night party were struggling. Routine activities were grinding to a halt.

As the eastern United States awoke, the scale of the problem became clear.

United Airlines and Delta found their passengers could not use online services. Commuters accustomed to scanning the New York Times' morning newsletter went without. Snapchatters fell silent; Reddit forums were hushed.

One third of all online users worldwide interact with Amazon Web Services (AWS) daily, according to DeepField Networks: companies ranging from Venmo to Reddit to Ring all rely on AWS servers. And, on Monday morning, the system was down - crashing a significant portion of the internet.

The fact such an outage could happen at all is 'surprising,' said cybersecurity expert James Knight, senior principal at Digital Warfare, which helps companies identify and shore up online vulnerabilities. It is also a troubling indicator of a new brand of chaos from which none of us are immune.

Knight told the Daily Mail: 'My first thought was wondering how it could occur. Apparently, some sort of database went down.

'It's surprising that one thing affected their network, because usually there's backup, and redundant systems all running at the same time. One particular system going down is very, very surprising.'

Knight admitted he was puzzled by the outage which, he noted, will have cost Amazon hundreds of millions of dollars.

It began at 3:11am ET. By 5:01am ET the problem had been identified, and a 'fix' deployed within 20 minutes.

Yet it remained unresolved and, at 8:48am ET, Amazon issued another update saying further fixes were being carried out.

The specter of a cyber-attack has inevitably been raised but, according to Knight, this is unlikely.