The internet fell apart Monday due to outages at a single company: Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud provider that powers many of the most popular apps and services we use.
People suddenly couldn’t prepare for tests because their study tools were on Canva; they couldn’t use their Amazon-owned Ring cameras; they couldn’t send a Venmo payment; and a few couldn’t even get their temperature-controlled mattresses to work.
Amazon’s issue suddenly was all of our issue, too.
“Many of the apps, websites and devices people use daily, whether for shopping, entertainment, work, or even home automation, depend on it,” said Feng Li, chair of information management at the Bayes Business School in City St George’s University in London. “When AWS goes down, the impact cascades through multiple layers of dependency, reaching far beyond Amazon’s own systems.”
The reason so many companies rely on Amazon Web Services is because most companies have moved their data operations to the cloud.
