The recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage would “easily reach” hundreds of billions in financial losses, said internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint CEO Mehdi Daoudi, citing productivity loss amid stopped or delayed business operations affecting industries from airlines to factories, CNN Business reported.
The outage hit major platforms such as Reddit, Snapchat, Fortnite, Duolingo, digital app Venmo, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, trading app Robinhood, US ridesharing company Lyft, video calling site Zoom, as well as artificial intelligence startup Perplexity. Reuters reported that the disruption also hit Amazon’s own shopping website, Prime Video, and Alexa.
Amazon announced on Monday afternoon that its cloud service was back to normal, though it added that some services such as AWS Config, Redshift, and Connect continue to have a backlog of messages that they will finish processing over the next few hours.
“We will share a detailed AWS post-event summary,” the company said.
This was one of the largest internet disruptions since last year’s CrowdStrike incident, which crippled hospitals and airports. It was also at least the third time in five years that AWS’s northern Virginia data centre, known as US-EAST-1, was linked to a major outage. Amazon did not explain why that centre keeps being affected.
Ken Birman, a computer science professor at Cornell University, told Reuters that software developers should build better fault tolerance and create backups with other cloud providers. He said AWS provides tools for that, but some companies skip those steps to “cut costs and cut corners” in getting an application up, which makes them more vulnerable when outages happen.
“Those companies are the ones who really ought to be scrutinised later,” he added.
At least a thousand companies were affected by the outage, according to Ookla. /TISG
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