Amazon Web Services, the largest cloud server network in the world, experienced technical problems. One origin, so many flaws.
Millions of people noticed: this Monday it happened on social networks, online gaming platforms, computer systems, websites and applications.
Zoom, Venmo, WhatsApp; Perplexity, Alexa, Snapchat; or Fortnite and Clash Royale – all were practically paralyzed, or with large spikes in interruptions.
Millions of people noticed. Thousands of services affected. Some of the biggest companies on the planet affected.
But the origin was just one: technical problems in the Amazon Web Services (AWS), the largest server network in cloud of the world.
The reported errors occurred at AWS facilities in northern Virginia, US, one of the company’s oldest and largest data centers, AWS confirmed.
In other words, it highlights the global economy is fragile. It is complex, it has the dimension that we know. But just break a link and major disruptions soon appear – online and in the real world.
A backbone of the internet is in three major suppliers of cloud: Amazon, Microsoft e Google. Millions of people and thousands of companies depend on each of them.
It wasn’t always like this. Many companies had their own data centers. But this is cheaper and more efficient.
The problem
For as long as there have been computer systems, there have been failures in computer systems. There always has been.
The problem now is the “risk of centralization”, summarizes Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist at Duckbill, an AWS consulting firm.
When a central link goes down, a company’s website doesn’t go down: all others fall at the same time. “As a society, we are still learning to deal with it.”
A company may even stop having its cloud on an external server; but many services software that companies buy would still use AWS or another cloud.
It is in these “blackouts” that we see invisible parts of critical infrastructure — both online and in the physical world.
These failures are uncommon on Amazon – which, on Monday night, ensured that all its services were operating normally.
Amazon is investigating what happened. Experts said the company usually analyzes deeply and learns from its mistakes.
“I hope the same failure doesn’t happen twice,” hopes Mike Chapple, professor of cybersecurity at the University of Notre Dame.
