Closed on Sundays, Maha Juice Bar banks on big business Monday mornings. But at the downtown Norwood, Massachusetts spot known for açaí bowls and smoothies, this Monday was anything but smooth due to issues with Amazon Web Services. 

“Today Toast was offline all day. It still is. We lost hundreds of orders, not just this location but all the other locations,” explained owner Marcieli Pastorio. “Even the credit card machine was offline. All the orders are going to be batched when it comes back online. We don’t know when we’re going to receive the credit card orders that went through today.”

The health food restaurant, with locations in Cambridge and Franklin, was one of the many, many victims of a massive outage across Amazon Web Services – which acts as a backbone for much of the internet. 

One-third of all internet traffic

“AWS, or Amazon, accounts for about one-third of all the internet traffic globally,” said cybersecurity expert Peter Tran. “Everything nowadays is hosted in the cloud, applications, hospital services, you know, transportation services, airlines, they all have their infrastructures on one form of Amazon. The government uses Amazon Web Services for their infrastructure as well.” 

Experts estimate the outage could cost billions. And even as many platforms begin to recover, business owners are holding their breath – bracing for the fallout. 

“Tips are a big part of how we get paid so that’s a big dent in the day,” said Sarah O’Malia of Golden Salon. 

At Golden Salon in Walpole, stylists shared in this painful reminder of our online dependence. Very few customers carry cash, and discovered they couldn’t send gratuity by Venmo. 

“Unfortunately, if somebody doesn’t send them right away, they forget. Things happen and you don’t want to send a text reminder. That comes off rude,” she said. 

O’Malia just opened her own salon in August, and she feels the weight of worrying how issues impact her team. 

“This is 13 years in the hair industry, and it’s been a dream since the very beginning. It’s a learning curve for sure. It’s not just me, it’s me and five others behind the chair,” O’Malia added.