It took a day without Amazon Web Services for Americans to realize how much the Internet depends on a single company.
It’s not just that people couldn’t place mobile coffee orders at Starbucks or ask Alexa for the weather. Hospitals said essential communications services were not working and teachers could not access classes scheduled for the day. Chime, a mobile banking service, was also down, leaving people without access to their money. Ring and Blink cameras, as well as most smart home devices, stopped working.
AWS is one of a small group of cloud computing giants that make up the backbone of the Internet, providing businesses with the back-end computing tools needed to power crucial parts of their daily operations. This includes everything from storage to virtual servers, which businesses can use to develop and deploy applications without investing in their own hardware.
While there are other cloud providers, they don’t have the scale and reach of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. These three elements power the majority of cloud services worldwide, about 60% of the market, Roy Illsley, chief analyst at Omdia, told CNN. But of these three, AWS is the largest with about 37% of the market, according to research firm Gartner. AWS has 4 million customers, according to an HG Insights report released this year.
So when a platform like AWS goes down, it has a cascading effect.
One expert has already estimated that the total impact of this disruption will be in the billions of dollars.
“It creates a very large single point of failure that then impacts warehouse operations, deliveries and the ability for people to sell their goods and services on websites,” Jacob Bourne, an analyst at eMarketer, told CNN.
Debi Dougherty and her husband were hit by the fallout from the AWS at almost every stop on their Monday morning runs in and around New Albany, Indiana.
To start the day, Dougherty received Ring alerts that there was a car in her driveway, but she couldn’t see the camera. She thought it was a problem with Ring.
However, when she went to the doctor for her husband’s first radiation appointment, the scheduling software was so spotty that it took 40 minutes to book the next 25 days of appointments – which usually only takes a few minutes.
The next stop at Kohl’s led to even more delays. The line was congested because the credit card reader was broken.
The Doughertys then stopped for lunch at Cattleman’s Roadhouse, where the manager offered to pay for their meal because the restaurant was unable to process cards.
“He said, ‘It’s not your fault, and you’re already eating. I don’t suppose you all have money?'” Debi Dougherty said. “And we both looked at each other, and I was like, ‘Not enough to cover this meal.'”
Still, she said, the experience Monday morning was “scary” to say the least, knowing how dependent society is on technology.
“(Companies) are putting all their eggs in one (AWS) basket, because it touches a lot of different industries,” she said. “And that might not be the smartest thing to do.”
Cattleman’s, which uses the Toast point-of-sale system that relies on AWS, was grateful that the outage occurred on a Monday, not a Friday, Saturday or Sunday, said Cameron Sharp, general manager of the New Albany location.
“If this goes on for several days, or if God forbid – and let me find some wood here so I can knock on it – it happens over the weekend, we’re in trouble,” Sharp said.
Sharp ended up only having to prepare one meal on Monday before realizing that only one Toast terminal in the restaurant could store the transactions.
“Our entire economy is based on trade,” he said. “Because we are so intertwined with each other, this (AWS outage) is going to upset a lot of people.”
In the broader Houston area, Dia Giordano spent her Monday trying to sort out the mess the outage had caused to her three businesses: an Italian restaurant, eight mental health clinics and a few rental properties.
DoorDash was “blowing up” its phone starting at 2 a.m., warning that the online ordering system, run by Toast, was down.
“That means a third of my stuff is gone for the day,” she told CNN. “At least with the publicity (of the outage), people might be understanding, but I still get messages asking if we’re open, because the website just disappeared. It’s just not there.”
Toast, when contacted Monday, declined to comment.
At Giordano’s mental health clinics, its practitioners and administrative staff members were unable to validate clients’ insurance information because the online clearinghouse was not working.
And on top of that, Venmo was down, which meant she couldn’t receive the rent payments she normally received.
“We just play it by ear, moment to moment,” she said.
But in the meantime, regarding reliance on technology, “it’s scary,” she said.