The Tuesday outage at an Amazon Web Service data center that affected services from several collaboration software vendors, highlighting how reliant companies have grown to be on cloud providers for a number of workplace tools.

Asana, Smartsheet, Trello, and Slack – which host their services on the AWS cloud – reported problems following AWS outage. Smartsheet and asana said users were not able to access services for about two hours, while Trello experienced disruption to its “email to board” and “dashcards” features. Slack reported problems with its audio chatroom “huddles” feature, email integrations, tuesday and file uploads, but didn’t specify the disruptions were because of the AWS outage (Slack declined to touch upon whether the outage caused the its service issues).

AWS’ own Chime video meeting app was affected, the ongoing company said.  Other core AWS services were offline from 11 a roughly.m. ET to 6 p.m. Tuesday – the majority of the workday for companies affected et. Those services included the company’s Elastic Compute and DynamoDB cloud tools, which are accustomed to host customer applications.

The outage affected APIs at AWS’ US East 1 data center, the primary cause linked to “an impairment of several network devices,” AWS said on its  service status page .

While Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors typically provide high degrees of uptime, outages aren’t uncommon. A  DNS issue caused connectivity problems for a small amount of Slack users in September, for instance, while Microsoft Teams, that is hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud, in April was knocked offline for multiple hours on two occasions, carrying out a four-hour outage in March. Google, which runs its Workspace collaborative apps alone cloud infrastructure, reported an outage  that affected usage of Gmail, Month google Chat along with other tools for users in Europe just last.

These outages are resolved inside a few hours generally, however the disruption that business users can face when struggling to connect underlines the significance now of cloud software for most workers. It has been more evident through the COVID-19 pandemic even, with many collaboration vendors reporting substantial increases in users during the last 18 months as much businesses rushed to aid remote work.

“SaaS collaboration providers have expanded their footprint lately significantly; it has placed a spotlight on the growth, overshadowing the risks that include counting on cloud-based technology vendors,” said Raúl Castañón, senior analyst at 451 Research, a division of S&P Global Market Intelligence.

“While it’s unlikely that the outage can lead to significant customer losses for cloud-based technology vendors, it shall put pressure in it to provide mechanisms to reduce or eliminate these risks.”