On Monday, October 20, millions of internet users got a painful answer to a question few even knew existed. The question was: What do Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Signal, United and Delta airlines and countless other web-based .
October 20, millions of internet users got a painful answer to a question few even knew existed. The question was: What do Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Signal, United and Delta airlines and countless other web-based sites and services have in common?
The answer is: They were all brought down by a cascading glitch at a data center in northern Virginia owned and operated by Amazon Web Services, an arm of the giant e-commerce company.
AWS is one of the top three cloud platforms, meaning that it holds its clients’ data on its own servers and manages the transfer and transmission of that data within the client companies and between them and end users.
When AWS’ northern Virginia data hub went down a few minutes before midnight Sunday, Pacific Daylight Time, 141 AWS services went dark, along with client firms reliant on its hub, producing a cascade of outages affecting users around the world. Users of Amazon’s own Ring home security devices such as video-enabled doorbells were affected.
Amazon didn’t declare that the problem had been fixed until 3:53 p.m. PDT Monday, although some clients were still reporting problems as late as Tuesday.
The damage done to AWS clients and their millions of users is incalculable. As my colleague Queenie Wong reported, web users couldn’t access their services or accounts.
Customers of some banks, as well as the web brokerage Robinhood, couldn’t complete transactions. Delta and United passengers were unable to track reservations, check in online or retrieve their seat assignments; airline employees were forced to resort to manual alternatives, like in prehistoric (i.e., pre-internet) times.
Owners of Eight Sleep mattress covers, which cost thousands of dollars and require an annual fee of $300 or $400, use a web app to adjust temperature and incline, reported being stuck in uncomfortable positions and sweltering under uncontrollable heat. The company’s chief executive issued an online apology and said Eight Sleep would roll out a feature allowing owners to connect with their beds via Bluetooth if the internet connection failed.
The outage is certain to raise questions about whether Amazon—and its fellows in Big Tech—supervise their systems with the rigor appropriate to crucial services with a global footprint. As lawyers put it, «res ipsa loquitur»—»the thing speaks for itself.» The answer it gives is «no.»
In the old days when «plain old telephone service», or POTS, was entirely under the control of a single company, AT&T, the company’s commitment was to «five nines» reliability, meaning that it worked 99.999% of the time, or tolerated no more than about 5.26 minutes of downtime per year. Since AWS systems were down this week for at least 15 hours, or 900 minutes, it effectively tossed that standard in the trash.
The five nines standard reflected the conviction that phone service was too important not to be, in effect, always on. Today’s high-tech service providers often seem to take the attitude that just-good-enough should be good enough for anyone.
As I noted last year, some of today’s richest companies pocket billions of dollars in profits but don’t spend enough to protect their customers’ private personal data from hackers—for example, AT&T, which booked a pretax profit of $16.
