Why an AWS Outage Can Break the Internet

If you used the internet at all on Monday, you probably noticed a lot of things weren’t working all that well. Sites and services around the world experienced interruptions, including the likes of Facebook, McDonald’s, and even Fortnite. You might have heard by now that the issues were caused by an AWS outage. If you don’t know what AWS is, however, that explanation might not be all that clear.

“Amazon Web Services” runs the internet

AWS is an Amazon subsidiary, short for Amazon Web Services. The company offers over 200 cloud-based products to customers, including applications for all of the following:

• Accessing AWS services

• Analytics

• Application integration

• Blockchain

• Business applications

• Cloud Financial Management

• Compute

• Customer enablement

• Containers

• Databases

• Developer tools

• End user computing

• Frontend web and mobile services

• Game tech

• IoT

• Machine learning and AI

• Management and governance

• Media

• Migration and transfer

• Networking and content delivery

• Quantum technologies

• Satellite

• Security, identity, and compliance

• Storage

More than this list, it’s important to understand why AWS matters. The service replaces the need for companies to purchase their own hardware for their data storage, networking, and computing requirements. Instead, companies can choose to outsource these needs to AWS, and adjust those services as those needs change. As such, a company can start out hiring AWS to handle a small amount of their processing, but as the company grows, they can choose to add more servers to their plan—rather than invest in additional hardware to handle the processing. This is known as cloud computing.

In order to keep up with a global demand, AWS relies on a large number of physical server locations spread out throughout the world. Amazon says AWS has 120 “Availability Zones” across 38 global regions—physical locations that contain at least one data center with “redundant power, networking, and connectivity.” The idea is, having these physical data centers across continents means your cloud compute is easier to expand and is better protected from failure—which is a little ironic, given today’s events.