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What Does It Take to Prevent an Internet Outage?

A major part of Amazon Web Services was down for hours on Tuesday, creating havoc for websites up and down the East Coast.
Image: Network cables are plugged in a server room
Network cables are plugged in a server room on Nov. 10, 2014 in New York.Michael Bocchieri / Getty Images, file

Remember the old adage, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket?"

Companies may want to heed that advice when it comes to where they store their data, according to experts.

A major part of Amazon's cloud service was down for hours this week, causing many popular websites to load slowly or not at all. This was the second major internet outage in the last six months after a botnet attack on Dyn brought part of the internet to a standstill.

The outage showed just how much many websites, such as Slack, Trello and Medium; and small businesses, rely on Amazon Web Services. Netflix, which also uses Amazon Web Services, was — to the internet's relief — not impacted by the outage.

"It's kinda terrifying how much of the internet is down because of the AWS outage right now," one person wrote on Twitter.

Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint Systems, a digital experience monitoring company, said the issue isn't with the service providers or the inevitable outages — it's the fact that many companies don't spread their data across multiple regions.

"It’s bound to happen. They think the cloud is some magical la la land where nothing happens and everything is hunky dory," Daoudi told NBC News. "We moved from a model where a company would have your servers, data center, your stuff, to outsourcing it."

It's unclear what caused the partial Amazon Web Services outage, but Jeremiah Grossman, chief of security at SentinelOne, told NBC News that it's important to remember nothing is perfect.

"No matter what anyone does, there will be single points of failure. There's no way to guarantee 100 percent up time," Grossman said.

Related: Amazon Web Services Issue Leaves Part of the Internet in Disarray