Where it is: The east coast region of the Amazon, responsible for much of the Internet, is the cause.
- Zoom, According to tracker Downdetector, Venmo, WhatsApp and many gaming, banking, social media and consumer sites saw significant increases in reported outages.
- The site says more than 11 million people worldwide reported issues with more than 2,500 companies as of 12:45 p.m. EST, and that it was the largest AWS outage of the year.
- Amazon said it fixed the problem, but as of early afternoon on the East Coast, many websites were still experiencing disruption.
- As of Monday evening, Amazon said all of its services had “returned to normal operations” but that some “will continue to have a backlog of messages that they will finish processing over the next few hours.”
Zoom out: Just three major cloud computing providers – Amazon, Microsoft and Google – make up the technical backbone of the Internet. Millions of people and thousands of businesses rely on each of them.
- This is a recent phenomenon: companies used to have their own data centers.
- But outsourcing this infrastructure to large cloud computing companies is cheaper and more efficient.
Between the lines: IT systems have always had problems or breakdowns, what’s different now is the “risk of centralization,” says Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist at Duckbill, an AWS consulting firm.
- Instead of one company’s website going down, they all go down at once. As a society, we’re still learning how to deal with this, he says.
- Even if a company tried to stop outsourcing this work, it would still face reality. — the many software services businesses purchase would still use AWS or another cloud provider.
The big picture: It takes a crisis to make invisible elements of critical infrastructure visible, both online and in the physical world.
- During COVID, we all got a lesson in the importance of the supply chain, learning that silicon chips power a lot of our products and that in fact only one island (Taiwan) makes them.
- The crisis has also exposed the general fragility of the just-in-time economy, in which companies keep just enough inventory on hand so that any delay causes massive disruption.
“We are indeed trying and extract all the fat from various interactions, at some point you start to get bones,” Quinn says.
Yes, but: These outages rarely happen to Amazon, says Mike Chapple, who teaches cybersecurity at the University of Notre Dame.
- There was also a major disruption in 2021 that affected everything from Disney parks to Adele ticket sales, Bloomberg reported at the time.
- Most companies design their services with built-in failsafes that can handle outages. It’s more expensive for small businesses; they are more susceptible.
What’s next: Amazon is investigating the cause of Monday’s outage, Axios’ Avery Lotz reports. Cybersecurity and cloud experts said the company typically does a thorough analysis and learns from its mistakes.
- “I hope you never experience the same type of failure twice,” Chapple says.
Flashback: How a Single Software Update Broke the Internet
Editor’s note: This article was updated with details from Amazon’s announcement Monday evening.
