Woodkirk Stone
Amazon Web Services was down for tens of thousands of users around the world on Wednesday morning, leading to the shutdown of several popular websites, including Netflix, Doordash, and Hulu, marking the second time in a week that the service d cloud hosting fails.
According to Daily mail, the Amazon-owned platform started experiencing issues around 10:24 a.m. ET, with users citing the website, hosting, and server connection as all having issues. He resumed full duty shortly after 12:20 p.m. ET.
Only a few countries, including the United States, China, the United Kingdom and India, reported problems, which were less prevalent than during the previous outage.
On December 9, Amazon Web Services went down for seven hours and swept away several other websites that use the company’s cloud servers.
However, DownDetector, which monitors outages online, shows that Doordash, Netflix, Hulu, and Twitch experienced Wednesday’s outage again – and they all use Amazon Web Services to host their websites.
The AWS Service Health Dashboard showed internet connectivity issues in northern California and Oregon, but DownDetector’s outage map highlights New York and Boston as having issues as well. .
A message on the status page reads, “We are investigating Internet connectivity issues in the US-WEST-1 and US-WEST-2 regions. ”
AWS provides cloud computing services to individuals, universities, governments, and businesses around the world, such as servers, storage, networking, remote computing, email, mobile development, and security.
When AWS goes down, so do other websites that use its services, which is an embarrassing blow to the Amazon-owned platform – these businesses, universities, individuals, and governments pay to use the services.
All Amazon services went down on December 9, with issues appearing around 10:40 a.m. ET and lasting until at least 8 p.m. ET.
The blackout temporarily disrupted streaming platforms Netflix Inc and Disney +, the Robinhood Markets Inc trading app, and even Amazon’s own e-commerce site, which makes heavy use of AWS.
Some companies that use Amazon Web Services, like Canvas and Paramount +, found that service was restored around 5 p.m. ET, but many sites were still down until later that evening.
In addition to wiping out entire swathes of the internet, the eruption also left Amazon’s delivery trucks idle, drivers unable to access their routes, and warehouse workers patiently waiting for computers to come back online. .
Amazon said “degradation of multiple network devices” in its Amazon Web Services Virginia data center region caused the extended outage last week.
The huge trail of damage from a single region network problem that AWS calls “US-EAST-1” has highlighted just how difficult it is for businesses to spread their cloud computing.
With 24.1% of the global market, according to research firm IDC, Amazon is the world’s largest cloud computing company.
Competitors like Microsoft Corp, Alphabet’s Google Inc, and Oracle Corp are trying to trick AWS customers into using parts of their clouds, often as a backup.
Creating a complex online service that can be easily transferred from one provider to another in an emergency is far from straightforward, said Naveen Chhabra, senior analyst at research firm Forrester.
Rather than being a single ‘cloud’, AWS is actually made up of hundreds of different services, ranging from basic building blocks such as computing power and storage to advanced services such as high speed databases. and training in artificial intelligence.
Any given website, Chhabra said, can use dozens of these individual services, each of which must be working in order for the site to work.
It is difficult to back up to another cloud provider because some services are owned by AWS and some work very differently at another provider.
“It’s like saying, ‘Can I put an SUV body on a sedan chassis? Maybe, if everything is the same and aligns. But there is no guarantee, â€Chhabra said.
Another issue that makes it difficult for businesses to diversify is that AWS makes sending data to its cloud relatively inexpensive, but then charges higher prices for the “egress fees” to pull the data from its cloud and pull it off. send to a competitor.
“It magnifies problems like this (outage) when they occur,” said Matthew Prince, managing director of internet security company Cloudflare.
“A more resilient cloud is a cloud where egress costs are eliminated and customers can be multi-cloud. I think it would actually increase customer trust in the cloud.