Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest cloud provider, resolved the issues that plagued its services for about 15 hours on Monday, an episode that highlighted how much of the Internet is dependent on the operations of a single company.
In an update on its service health dashboard, the Amazon.com Inc unit said all of its services “returned to normal operations” as of about 6pm New York time.
AWS — data storage, computing power and other building blocks — underpin a large chunk of the Internet, accounting for about one-third of the cloud market.
Photo: Reuters
DownDetector, a Web site that tracks online outages, said in a Facebook post that it received more than 11 million user reports of problems at more than 2,500 companies.
Financial services outfits Venmo and Robinhood Markets Inc, Apple Inc’s music and TV offerings, software companies such as Zoom Communications Inc, Salesforce Inc and Snowflake Inc, food-services giants including McDonald’s Corp and gaming companies such as Epic Games Inc, and even Amazon’s own services, including Alexa and the Ring home security system, were not immune, it said.
Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist with Duckbill, which advises businesses on their cloud spending, said Monday’s outage was likely the worst for AWS since a major disruption in December 2021.
AWS earlier said a digital directory for a key database service malfunctioned, causing cascading failures when software reliant on the widely used data trove was unable to retrieve information. By early Monday New York time, the company said it had identified and fixed the underlying issue, which hit its operations on the US East Coast, AWS’s largest cluster of data centers.
However, as the company worked to fix that issue, engineers found that other subsystems — including one necessary for customers to launch new rented servers — had been hit by the database outage.
Most glitches on major tech systems are fixed quickly. Still, interconnected technology systems have meant that problems at one company can cause catastrophic impacts across the global economy.
AWS leads the cloud computing market, followed closely by Microsoft Corp’s Azure, with Google Cloud in third place. Businesses, governments and consumers worldwide rely on their infrastructure for online activities.
“Major providers like AWS going down represent vulnerabilities in what have become critical infrastructure for organizations and, in some cases, governments globally,” Emarketer Inc senior analyst Jacob Bourne said. “As cloud reliance and workloads expand, these outages could hit industries harder.”
Additional reporting by AFP
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