By Andrew Georgy
On Oct. 20, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced an outage that affected thousands of web services globally and millions of consumers, including students and teachers at Fountain Valley High School, who use Canvas (which is owned by Amazon Web Services).
Background:
AWS is considered to be the backbone of the internet by many, supplying web services for thousands of major websites, including Canvas, Pearson and even games such as Fortnite.
AWS provides the tools and computers for data management and storage for over a third of the Internet’s websites. The outage downed hundreds of thousands of these data management and storage services.
Cause:
The outage lasted for over 15 hours and lost Amazon over $500 million in stock losses alone. Amazon now attributes this loss of service to “a latent defect within the service’s automated DNS [domain name system] management system.”
DNS is like a map, telling websites where they are. When DNS failed for AWS, it meant that the websites were still there; they just couldn’t transfer traffic.
The DNS error took place in AWS’ oldest data center, in Northern Virginia, and it led to a downpour of other errors that plagued the systems for hours.
Effects:
The US and the UK led the outages with 6.3 million and 1.5 million reports respectively, while the services that were most affected were Snapchat, Roblox and Amazon.
Experts warn that the AWS is an example of putting all your eggs in one basket, since it holds over ⅓ of the world’s websites. After the outage, some stress that it’s better to diversify instead of the over reliance on one company. However, there have been no official announcements thus far that some companies have terminated their contracts with AWS over the outage.
Conclusion
While services were fully restored after a few hours, the ripple effect of the outage was felt by millions of consumers worldwide and small and big corporations alike. However, not much change has been authorized by companies, leading to the possibility of another large outage if Amazon Web Services fails again.
