Amazon escapes the internet outage caused by its own cloud computing service

When Amazon's cloud computing service failed on Tuesday, more than half of the internet's top 100 e-commerce websites were affected.

Which site didn't get burned? Amazon.com, of course.

The AWS S3 cloud computing service backs more than 150,000 websites, so the disruption left a wide swath of the web in shambles -- with S&P 500 companies losing an estimated $150 to $160 million as a result, Business Insider reports.

E-commerce sites really felt the burn, with the websites for retailers like Express and Lululemon down completely while load times for the Disney Store were 1,165 percent longer than normal. Nike, Target and Nordstrom all experienced delayed load times as well, according to estimates from the web-monitoring company Apica.

All in all, the outage affected 54 of the top 100 internet retailers, according to Apica's estimates. Those sites experienced at least a 20 percent decrease in performance, and sometimes more.

Amidst all the e-retailer damage, however, there was at least one site spared.

Amazon wasn't down and neither was its e-commerce sites like Zappos. And the reason for that is relatively simple, according to Business Insider -- its sites are spread out across a number of geographic zones so a malfunction in one area doesn't mean the whole thing breaks down.