AWS Outage
Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest provider of cloud infrastructure technologies for businesses, experienced a major outage on Tuesday. Consumers watched their robot vacuum cleaners stop obeying commands and orders from Whole Foods were abruptly canceled. Popular websites and services were taken offline, including Google, Slack, and Spotify — consumers were infuriated.
According to Amazon, fulfillment centres and delivery services came to a halt in several parts of the US. Employees say the internal software used to scan packages and load delivery routes was taken offline. The disruption comes at a particularly bad time — in the middle of holiday season.
Third-party merchants, who account for more than half of all Amazon retail volume, rely on the holiday season for a large percentage of their yearly sales. Many of these merchants, some who rely on AWS to process over 90% of their orders, were unable to receive products because of the outage.
The outage highlights the dangers of having so much economic activity dependent on technology from a few providers. According to Synergy Research Group, AWS dominated 33% of the world’s cloud infrastructure market in Q2, followed by Microsoft (20%) and Google (10%). Just 3 companies control over 60% of the entire cloud infrastructure market.
Amazon isn’t the only web services company to experience outages this year. In June, Fastly, a company that helps firms deliver digital content to users, had an outage that brought down major websites including Amazon, Hulu, and The New York Times. In October, Facebook suffered its largest outage since 2008.
According to AWS, it took Amazon around nine hours to repair the difficulties. As more companies use cloud infrastructure technology to deliver services, it’s important that web service companies do everything they can to fix and avoid outages.
I am not a financial advisor and my comments should never be taken as financial advice. Investments come with risk, so always do your research and analysis beforehand.
