On one Monday morning, early at 3 a.m., users across the internet were suddenly unable to access the apps they needed. A small issue one day on October 20th at Amazon Web Services caused platforms like Snapchat and even large airlines to face problems in their online infrastructure.
An initial solution was put in place, but failed shortly after, as shown by the great increase in reports, DownDetector found. Later, AWS was able to pinpoint the problem to a core feature of their system, namely the EC2 cloud network, which many organizations rely on for conveniently scalable applications. For this reason, AWS has become very widespread. Just last year, they accounted for more than a third of the global cloud market, generating more than $100 billion in revenue. Being available in 38 geographic regions, the use of their services is also important to the US Army, Capital One, the NFL, and Disney.
Students here at CdM felt the direct problems firsthand. One freshman, Jason Ying, recalled that “Schoology and Classlink were down” just after the initial outage. However, he wasn’t able to remember other effects throughout the internet, specifically mentioning the social media he used, Instagram, and other online services he used.
Other students, though, felt the reverberations in its fullness. Evan Liu, another freshman, noticed something more severe. When he was doing his work in his science class that morning, the Chromebooks “weren’t letting us log in.” Since Classlink, one of the websites that was down, was used to log into school computers, no one could get in. Eventually, the “teacher was forced to print handouts” instead.
Outages like this truly show how fragile the luxuries of the internet can be. Although technologies like AWS are amazing tools for education, this ordeal reveals key issues in its infrastructure. With cloud services becoming increasingly more popular, this only raises questions, especially with so many corporations worldwide relying on a single source. In the future, economic repercussions could be intensified, with billions lost, over issues that happened in the blink of an eye.
