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It started at about 3 a.m. local time on a computer in Northern VirginiaBut moments later it was everywhere.
when a Amazon The data center stopped functioning properly on Monday morning, shutting down most of the internet. For hours, users were unable to access many of the world’s most popular apps, platforms and services: everything from Snapchat to the UK tax authorities were shut down.
The outage reflects the complex nature of today’s Web: deeply intertwined with people’s lives, flexible and fragile at the same time. To critics, the dramatic, sudden and widespread nature of the incident shows that we rely too heavily on too few companies to power the Internet, though the fact that it is so rare and was fixed so quickly also shows how those companies were given that power in the first place.
Amazon Web Services Describes itself as a “provider of industry-leading cloud capabilities and expertise.” Its website reads, “Amazon Web Services is the world’s most comprehensive and widely adopted cloud, enabling customers to build anything they can imagine.” “We offer the largest choice of innovative cloud capabilities and expertise on the most comprehensive global infrastructure with industry-leading security, reliability and performance.”
The jargon and pretension may be a bit much, but it’s also a reflection of the importance and complexity of Amazon’s business. More simply, Amazon Web Services provides the infrastructure that powers the Web: computers, data centers, and other technologies that are rented to companies so they can show us the Snapchat messages and games we ask for.
It has been a very successful business. As can be seen in the widespread nature of the outage, many companies rely on AWS: It is the largest of its kind in the world, competing with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, and the money it makes now accounts for the bulk of Amazon’s profits.
This growth has come largely because it has made life much easier for companies. When they’re building an app or website, they don’t need to turn on data centers full of computers right away – instead they can rent them from Amazon as needed, resulting in them being more efficient.
This also means that it is reliable to a great extent. Amazon’s terms require it to strive to ensure that its services remain operational at least 99.99 percent of the time, and it is expected to achieve that goal.
But the short window of time in which it breaks – and when it in turn breaks the Internet – can be devastating. This means that such disruptions often give rise to more philosophical questions about whether Internet infrastructure should be deployed more widely.
The problem with Amazon Web Services appears to be related to the Domain Name System, or DNS, commonly known as the “phone book of the Internet.” When someone types an easy-to-remember web address into their browser – for example www.the-independent.com – DNS is used to translate it into the actual address where the required website can be found.
The way it works is a reflection of the communist, perhaps somewhat utopian, vision of the Internet that guided the early years of its development. This system extends across the web and around the world, allowing the interconnected nature of the Internet to work.
But it is exactly this spirit of the distributed web that has been lost somewhat in recent years – and which means that the outages seen at AWS today are rare but dramatic when they do occur. The technologies supporting the Internet have become concentrated in a relatively small number of companies, allowing for increased efficiency and economies of scale, but also balancing a larger portion of the Internet on a relatively smaller surface.
Even companies that are large enough to operate their own infrastructure have faced the problem of centralization. For example, in recent years, Meta has come to bring together the technology that powers its apps – Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and others – so that they are largely the same on the back end. But this means that those rare disruptions in the company caused all of its products to be discontinued at the same time.
And the problem of centralization is not limited to web infrastructure. Last year, when a botched update of CrowdStrike was pushed to Windows computers, it shut down a lot of things that weren’t directly related: hospitals, airlines, and brick-and-mortar stores. But they were all using similar cybersecurity protections, and so all broke at the same time.