The episode underlines just how dependent businesses have become on the tech giants that deliver cloud computing services—and how dependent those companies have become on their own technology.
A lengthy outage at Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing arm of Amazon, caused chaos today for many companies and millions of users. The mega glitch affected access to a wide range of services, including shows on Netflix and Disney+, web services from airlines such as Delta and Southwest, and payments businesses such as Venmo. Many of Amazon’s own offerings, including the Ring smart doorbell service, its Alexa virtual assistant and its Amazon Music Service were impacted. The impact was also felt at Amazon’s delivery operations, with delivery drivers reportedly unable to access information via apps. The outage, which began this morning around 10.45am Eastern Time according to Downdetector, which tracks website outages and stretched into the early evening. In a statement published around 12.30pm, the company said that it was seeing multiple issues at data centers in its U.S.-East-I region, which it said were caused by “the impairment of several; network devices.” At just after 5pm, AWS said it had “executed a mitigation”, which was producing “a significant recovery in the region” but did not have a timeline for full recovery. Downdetector was still showing plenty of reports of problems with the service still coming in. The episode underlines just how dependent businesses have become on the tech giants that deliver cloud computing services—and how dependent those companies have become on their own technology.
