AWS had a massive outage on Monday morning, causing hiccups for thousands of applications and websites around the globe. The issues began around 07:00 BST, leading to widespread disruptions for users of major platforms such as Snapchat, Reddit, and Roblox, as well as banking services like Lloyds and Halifax.
Downdetector showed more than four million users spamming the platform with newly reported outages. This spike happened at all 500 locations within only a few hours after the event. Amid escalating challenges, global reports recently topped 6.5 million. Affected services were hardly able to get back on their feet after the disruptions, with early summer reaching a high of over six million. By approximately 11:00 BST, Amazon announced that most impacted services had returned to normal.
As many of you know, AWS blamed the outage on an issue with DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in the US-EAST-1 region. Even more troubling was the fact that this dynamic played out on systems that are deeply dependent on third-party services for the backbone of critical infrastructure.
Esyllt Carr, a tech expert, noted the implications of such outages: “So many online services rely upon third parties for their physical infrastructure, and this shows that problems can occur in even the largest of those third-party providers.” She further emphasized the potential impact of minor errors, stating, “Small errors, often human made, can have widespread and significant impact.”
Matthew Prince, chief executive of Cloudflare, remarked on the gravity of the situation: “Everyone has a bad day, today Amazon had a bad day.” He highlighted both the benefits and risks associated with reliance on cloud services, saying, “There are amazing things about the cloud. It allows you to scale… but if you have an outage like this it can take down a lot of services we rely on.”
Cori Crider, head of the Future of Technology Institute, compared the AWS outage to a catastrophic event: “An essential part of the economy has fallen to pieces.” He cautioned against the dangers of dependency on a few large service providers, noting that when a concentrated supply falters, “it takes a huge percentage of the economy out with it.”
The AWS outage, widely reported on these online social platforms, and banking services went down as well. It shone a light on the incredible interconnectedness of today’s infrastructure. As Professor Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey warned, there is an incredibly tight coupling between today’s digital systems. He cautioned that “when outages happen, there can be unintended and quite severe consequences.”
Whether the battle is over the merits of cloud-based solutions or how companies, workers and consumers should be protected, the incident has galvanized a vital conversation. Organizations are leveraging cloud solutions to power their everyday business operations now more than ever before. This outage is a dramatic reminder of the danger that accompanies that dependence.