Amazon.com’s lead in the cloud computing arena is well known, but just how far ahead is the company in providing the core backend infrastructure to make companies’ Web sites run? Consider this report by Wired magazine: According to research by DeepField Networks, one-third of Internet users in visited a Web site that used Amazon’s services each day.

That’s just mind-boggling when you think about it, and as reporter Robert McMillan writes, it speaks to how Amazon has “quietly become a massive utility.” Additional research from DeepField uncovers that Amazon touches roughly one percent of all Internet traffic in North America each day.

“The number of websites that would now break if Amazon were to go down, and the growing pervasiveness of Amazon behind the scenes, is really quite impressive,” DeepField co-founder Craig Labovitz tells Wired.

The scary thing about that statement is that a portion of Amazon Web Services actually did fail, one year ago this week. The outage impacted a number of Web sites, causing howls about Amazon’s lack of communication about what was going wrong.

Here’s a look at the growth of the company’s Simple Storage Service:

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