On October 20, thousands of platforms across the internet faced mass disruption due to the sudden Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage. The company started to experience “increased error rates for AWS services” roughly between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. ET at its US-EAST-1 cluster located in northern Virginia, according to Reuters.
With the outage beginning early in the morning, online users quickly reported issues with popular apps and websites. Snapchat, Fortnite, and Roblox are just a few of the many affected. Banking services, such as Venmo and Chime, left people without access to their financial information. Furthermore, the consequences of the shutdown even stretched outside the digital space. Airline companies like United Airlines were met with total chaos at airports. Hospitals were completely disconnected from crucial communication lines. By 6 p.m, the problem had been resolved, according to Amazon. Despite this announcement from the company, some companies still experienced ongoing struggles. A system malfunction was observed to be the root cause of the issue, according to BBC.
AWS is one of the three main competitors in the cloud computing market. AWS, along with Microsoft’s Azure and Google’s Google Cloud Platform, holds 60% of the entire market.
However, even within this oligopoly, AWS is known to be the largest, holding approximately 37% of the industry, according to CNN. Amazon’s dominance in the field reflects its significant role as the internet’s main cloud computing provider. Today, a large number of businesses rely on AWS to manage their online servers. The service is essentially the structural backbone of the internet, with its tools supporting a broad series of important functions that benefit companies and help provide a smooth experience for millions of users. Naturally, if a big-time platform like AWS fails to perform its job, which has the dependence of millions on the line, the whole system crumbles apart.
The economy experienced an enormous loss from the internet shutdown. The impact of this one-day internet disruption will cost billions of dollars, as estimated by Mehdi Daoudi, founder of an internet performance monitoring company. While the financial effects from the outage are truly devastating, many are now starting to turn their focus on the vulnerabilities of relying on big, influential companies to stand as the pillar of something as critical as the internet.
Cybersecurity expert Betsy Cooper says that there are pros and cons to depending on Amazon or other significant providers. They are popular, extremely easy to access, and show well-rounded performance overall. However, the benefits are outweighed by the bad when a large-scale problem occurs. This in turn exposes the gaps in the system, which mirrors exactly what happened in this global outage.
While smaller outages happen, massive outages have only happened occasionally. However, technology reporter Liv McMahon, warned that they are recurring more than ever, according to the BBC. With increasing reliance on the internet, the pressure placed on cloud service providers is intensifying. Even a slight error or glitch will ultimately end up shattering the fragile network we have set up, and the hidden liabilities will continue to be revealed. Events similar to the recent AWS outage will surely take place in the near future, and discussions involving the internet’s current cloud infrastructure and our dependency on technology will likely be debated further.
