It’s rare, but it does happen. Yesterday, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the behemoth of the cloud computing world, faced an unplanned outage that sent waves across the Internet and rattled the digital ecosystem worldwide. This post aims to provide a glimpse into the Amazon Web Services universe, speculate on potential causes for the outage, list the impacted sites, and provide a historical perspective on the duration and history of AWS outages.
What is AWS?
First, for those who may not be familiar, AWS stands for Amazon Web Services, and it’s the cloud computing platform offered by Amazon.com Inc. It provides a broad range of services including computing power, storage options, networking, and databases to businesses and individuals around the world. These services help organizations scale and grow, supporting everything from simple websites to complex machine-learning applications. AWS controlled nearly a third of the global cloud market, serving millions of customers, including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies.
The Cause of the Outage
Amazon has yet to issue a detailed explanation for the cause of the outage. However, in the past, outages have been triggered by a variety of factors, including hardware failures, natural disasters, and even human error. One potential cause could be a hardware failure. AWS relies on thousands of servers distributed across the globe, and if a critical component fails, it can cause significant problems. Alternatively, software bugs can disrupt the system’s operation, as software controls much of the infrastructure. Another potential cause could be a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. These cyberattacks overwhelm a network with more traffic than it can handle, causing it to slow down or crash. AWS Health Dashboard
Affected Sites
Given AWS’s extensive client roster, an outage can impact various sites and services. While the exact scope of the current outage remains unknown, AWS hosts several high-profile sites and services. Past AWS outages have impacted streaming services like Netflix and Spotify, social media platforms like Instagram, and e-commerce websites like Amazon.
Duration of the Outage
Historically, AWS outages have varied in duration. Some are resolved within a matter of hours, while others can last for a day or more, depending on the complexity of the issue. Amazon is known for its prompt response to such disruptions, and its teams of engineers are likely working tirelessly to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. 
A Look at the Past
Despite its dominance and technical prowess, AWS has experienced several notable outages in the past. In 2017, a simple typo by an Amazon engineer took down a large chunk of the internet, including Trello, Quora, and IFTTT, for about four hours. In November 2020, an issue with AWS’s Kinesis Data Streams, a service that helps process large streams of data in real time, resulted in a significant outage. It affected many services, including Adobe Spark, Roku, and Amazon’s Ring smart home division, and lasted nearly a day.
What this means if you are on AWS.
While AWS outages can cause significant disruption due to the platform’s widespread use, they also underscore the importance of contingency planning and distributed systems in our increasingly digital world. As we await more information on this outage, it’s a potent reminder of the reliance many of us have on the services of companies like Amazon. Let’s hope that the teams at Amazon are able to rectify this problem swiftly and put in place measures to prevent a similar occurrence in the future. We’ll be keeping an eye out for more updates on the situation. Stay tuned by following on Twitter AWS Service Status