Amazon AWS experienced an outage that demonstrated how many companies are dependent on Amazon’s web-hosting cloud services. In fact, the outage earned a special alert on the top of DownDetector on Monday morning:
“User reports indicate issues at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the US-East-1 region. These problems are impacting multiple services that depend on AWS infrastructure. We’re monitoring the situation: check your local Downdetector site for the latest updates.”
AWS powers the Amazon marketplace, Ring security cameras, Fire TV, as well as services from third-party companies. Comments on the DownDetector report showed how dependent users are on AWS, whether they know it or not, including the following exchange:
Commentor A: “Holy crap. I didn’t think Amazon going down would shut my house off.”
Commentor B: “Great one. You win the internet this morning!”
Commentor A: “Lol right!? Like I knew they had a lot of power but damn I didn’t know they controlled everything.”
On a Reddit thread, users were taking the issue more seriously, with one person posting, “It’s mad how much of our web infrastructure is dependent on one company/service,” and another person replying, “Seriously, its honestly concerning. The fact one service going down can affect this many services and people is scary.”
Ecommerce professionals discussed the outage on LinkedIn, with Procurement & Logistics Manager Ashley Wood explaining the ripple effects of the outage on his company’s business, writing in part, ” Maybe we need to take it back a few years and make sure we all have some backups for when all this happens as it seems to be becoming ever more regular than it used to be!”
Amazon’s AWS Status page has more information about the outage, with the first problem reported just after midnight Pacific Time on Monday morning (12:11). By 2:27 am PDT, Amazon reported it was seeing significant signs of recovery.