A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage left many companies and households in the dark for more than five hours on Tuesday, according to the Associated Press. The issue primarily impacted the U.S. East Coast – from car dealerships and airlines to streaming services, payment apps, and even certain home appliances.

Amazon’s own e-commerce services were also affected. Warehouse workers and delivery drivers posted on Reddit that they were unable to access the company’s Flex and AtoZ apps, which made it impossible for them to scan packages or search delivery routes, and independent contractors were unable to sign up for shifts, so they could not work all day.

Public data access activist Carl Malamud said the outage demonstrates how Big Tech companies have sullied the original intent behind the internet, which was created as a decentralized network meant to endure major disasters like a nuclear attack.

“When we put everything in one place, be it Amazon’s cloud or Facebook’s monolith, we’re violating that fundamental principle,” Malamud, who developed the internet’s first radio station, said. “We saw that when Facebook became the instrument of a massive disinformation campaign, we just saw that today with the Amazon failure.”

Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at network intelligence firm Kentik Inc., said such outages “are hard to completely avoid due to operational complexity but are very impactful when they happen.” The timing of this one was particularly poor, however, given that it is peak season for holiday shopping, and Amazon is under heightened pressure to deliver packages on time. 

AWS announced late Tuesday evening that it had “resolved” the “network device issues” causing the outage, and was working to get all services running smoothly again, according to Barron’s.