The recent AWS outage knocked out several thousand businesses worldwide, including many public and private sector entities responsible for ensuring public safety at critical infrastructure sectors. The emergency declaration started Monday afternoon. It stretched over an estimated 15 hours, locking millions of Americans out of crucial services such as airline tracking for travel, payment portals, and even smart home security. The total financial cost of the outage is not yet known. A comparable breach at CrowdStrike last year reportedly cost Fortune 500 companies some $5.4 billion.
The outage was primarily rooted in AWS cloud servers, which provide a significant portion of the infrastructure supporting the internet. Just three tech companies—including AWS—dominate more than 60 percent of the cloud computing market. This tragic incident is a reminder of the dangers facing those in the industry and the fragility of its success. These disruptions eventually shook consumer industries. The effects were especially disastrous for popular online apps, including Venmo, Microsoft Outlook, Zoom, Snapchat and Lyft—all of which experienced a widespread outage that day.
DownDetector, which tracks user-submitted reports of online service problems, recorded a steep increase in outage complaints. This uptick comes at the height of the event. Even after AWS worked to fix these issues, several of the biggest websites in the world were still suffering from outages as late as Tuesday morning.
Saurabh Vishnubhakat, one of the authors, said, “It’s really off base to point to Amazon’s size or market dominance and say that that’s causing these problems. AWS is so big that it’s hard for it not to have those outages, but the size itself doesn’t cause the outages,” he said. Meanwhile, Qi Liao pointed out the critical nature of these services: “People’s lives depend on it. Not to mention we’re losing billions of dollars every minute these services are down.”
The extensive consequences of the outage demonstrated, in terrifying terms, just how much everyday life is now dependent on cloud services. Passengers had trouble getting their money back from airlines and consumers had difficulty making daily transactions. The crash highlighted the fact that there will always be holes in the cyber protections meant to safeguard individuals’ online lives.
“This outage is a big wake-up call for the fact that we have a few major big tech cloud providers that are undergirding a lot of our critical infrastructure,” remarked Timothy Edgar. This sentiment is the result of increasing worries about putting all our eggs in very few baskets when it comes to key digital functions.
As experts such as Vishnubhakat warned, the outage created a host of difficulties. He said larger companies do tend to have the resources to roll out robust fail-safes across their data centers. “The fail-safes, particularly at data centers, that companies create and put in place are actually easier for the bigger companies to establish,” he explained.
