Apps and platforms relying on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing service, were in a jam this morning after an hours-long outage took down a sizable chunk of the world’s internet — in a striking example of how infrastructure consolidation makes the modern internet vulnerable to a failure by a single major provider.
The affected platforms ranged from messaging apps like Snapchat and Signal to video games like Roblox and Fortnite, as well as financial service platforms like Venmo, Robinhood, and Chime, according to the Associated Press. Even the AP‘s online newswire services were affected — along with corporate systems tied into the consumer supply chain, like those used by United Airlines, Delta, T-Mobile, and AT&T.
Devices relying on AWS were also disrupted, like Amazon’s Ring doorbell surveillance cameras, and many Alexa home assistants, which require a constant connection to the internet.
“BREAKING: half of the internet is down,” seethed one netizen. “Is there no alternative to AWS[?]”
Overall, some 1,000 companies were left reeling from the outage, with over one million complaints logged in the US, and more than 800,000 from the UK, per Newsweek. Countries like the Netherlands, Australia, France, and Japan each accounted for around 400,000 outage reports a pop.
According to local news reporting, the outage appears to stem from a cascading issue in Amazon’s US-EAST-1 region, located in Northern Virginia. That particular stretch of the US is home to over 50 data center campuses, earning it the cynical nickname “data center alley.”
Most services were back by sunrise on Monday morning, but the event underscores a major bottleneck in global web infrastructure: that global cloud infrastructure — the systems hosting the websites and services that fuel our economy — is overwhelmingly controlled by two companies, AWS and Microsoft’s Azure. (Google holds a distant third.)
“Really shows how easy it would be for [Amazon founder Jeff] Bezos and [Oracle founder Larry] Ellison to just turn off the internet if they wanted to, for any reason,” one poster fretted.
It’s true: the event raises major red flags about the concentration of power held by megacorporations — and their financial interest in keeping it that way.
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