Amazon outage disrupts businesses across US
Washington, Dec. 8: A major outage in Amazon’s cloud computing network Tuesday severely disrupted services at a wide range of US companies for more than five hours, the latest sign of just how concentrated the business of keeping the internet running has become.
The incident at Amazon Web Services mostly affected the eastern US, but still impacted everything from airline reservations and auto dealerships to payment apps and video streaming services to Amazon’s own massive e-commerce operation. That included The Associated Press, whose publishing system was inoperable for much of the day, greatly limiting its ability to publish its news report.
Amazon has still said nothing about what, exactly, went wrong. In fact, the company limited its communications Tuesday to terse technical explanations on an AWS dashboard and a brief statement delivered via spokesperson Richard Rocha that acknowledged the outage had affected Amazon’s own warehouse and delivery operation but said the company was “working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible”.
Roughly five hours after numerous companies and other organisations began reporting issues, the company said in a post on the AWS status page that it had “mitigated” the underlying problem responsible for the outage, which it did not describe.
It took some affected companies hours more to thoroughly check their systems and restart their own services.
Amazon Web Services was formerly run by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who succeeded founder Jeff Bezos in July. The cloudservice operation is a huge profit centre for Amazon. It holds roughly a third of the $152 billion market for cloud services, according to a report by Synergy Research — a larger share than its closest rivals, Microsoft and Google, combined.
To technologist and public data access activist Carl Malamud, the AWS outage highlights how much Big Tech has warped the internet. —