Amazon’s miscue spotlights its cloud dominance

SEATTLE — There have been many opportunities to consider how crucial Amazon has become to the smooth operation of the internet over the past few years.

The most recent involved a case of fat fingers.

That event occurred late last month when an Amazon employee entered an incorrect set of commands on a computer, unintentionally knocking out a large set of servers in an Amazon data center in Virginia and, with it, an array of online services from other companies.

Among the many consequences of the shutdown: Users of the business messaging service Slack couldn’t upload files. Photos on the technology news site The Verge didn’t display. Quora, a popular question-and-answer site, couldn’t be reached.

It was a rare fumble for Amazon in cloud computing, in which companies pay to run their online applications in data centers operated by big providers.

While would-be competitors snoozed, the internet retailer tiptoed into the business technology market over the past decade, becoming the dominant force in cloud computing. Its computing business, Amazon Web Services, hauled in $12.2 billion in revenue last year from customers ranging from Netflix to the CIA.

Amazon’s leading position has come with side effects. Its two biggest rivals — Microsoft and Google — are asleep no more. They and other technology companies have preached the benefits of working with multiple cloud providers — the kind of marketing message one would expect from underdogs in a category that could one day engulf the huge market for business software and hardware.

Amazon’s service interruption, though not nearly bad enough to spark a panic among customers, was viewed by some as a moment for reflection.

“It really is a wake-up call to enterprises,” said Craig McLuckie, a former Google technologist who is now chief executive of Heptio, a startup that makes software tools for more easily moving applications between clouds. “They certainly need to understand to what level of dependency they have on a single provider.”

A few years ago, Hearst, the media company, was exclusively using Amazon for cloud computing, but later added services from Microsoft and Google, said Philip Wiser, Hearst’s chief technology officer.

Because it’s early in the emergence of cloud computing, Wiser said he believed it was important to spread one’s bets around.

“Being multi-cloud as a company and having the skill and understanding of how to move between investments — that is an asset,” he said. “We have that as a stated mission for all of our infrastructure team.”