AWS Weekend Outage Potentially Impacts Millions of Internet Users
On Sunday, if you were trying to read something on Reddit, watch a movie on Netflix or find a date using Tinder, you might have experienced an issue accessing these popular services. Since Netflix, Reddit, Tinder and others are hosted on the AWS Public Cloud infrastructure, an outage impacting a core cloud service left some surfers without service.
The AWS outage is being attributed to a problem with the DynamoDB. While the problem is currently fixed, many web enthusiasts took to Twitter to complain about the outage. On Amazon’s service level page, many of the DynamoDB services in the AWS Northern Virginia datacenter were showing faults, which impacts many of the internet’s top websites and services. Analysts say that a similar outage back in 2013 cost Amazon $1,100 per second.
Amazon provided limited details on the outage saying, “The metadata service is now stable and we are actively working on removing throttles.”
Amazon hasn’t released much else on this unscheduled downtime, yet many analysts have taken to blogs to talk about the outage has impacted the wider web. Amazon Web Services is the undisputed leader in public cloud infrastructure. Since its start in the mid 2000s, Amazon has a gained a leg up on the IaaS market. By becoming the de facto leader in public cloud services, many of the world’s businesses have selected AWS and their elastic compute services to host their websites and apps.
Some analysts have used this opportunity to criticize organizations who use Amazon exclusively, citing mass outages of popular websites when one component in Amazon’s cloud fails. While Amazon may have to remit some fees to its clients based upon its service level agreement policies, the cloud service’s reputation for providing outstanding service and world class infrastructure shouldn’t be impacted due to this specific outage.
