A single point of failure for large swaths of critical services
The way I found out about this morning’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage was when my Signal messages wouldn’t send. We had to use Google Meet instead of Zoom for our weekly WAO meeting but everything was working again by lunchtime.
Still, it’s a reminder that not only is a huge infrastructure build-out such as AWS a single point of failure, they’re also an easy way for those that wish to control the internet to do so.
A massive cloud outage stemming from Amazon Web Services’ key US-EAST-1 region, its hub in northern Virginia, near the US Capitol, caused widespread disruptions of websites and platforms around the world on Monday morning. Amazon’s main ecommerce platform and other properties, including Ring doorbells and the Alexa smart assistant, suffered interruptions and outages throughout the morning, as did Meta’s communication platform WhatsApp, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, PayPal’s Venmo payment platform, multiple web services from Epic Games, multiple British government sites, and many others.
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AWS has suffered other large-scale outages, including a major incident in 2023. Reliance on central cloud services from giants like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Services has, in may ways, improved cybersecurity and stability around the world by creating a baseline of guardrails and best practices for all customers. But this standardization comes with major trade-offs, because the platforms become a single point of failure for large swaths of critical services.
Source: WIRED
Image: israel palacio