Amazon Web Services (AWS) has had a bad day.
This is how the head of another large American technology company, Cloudflare, put it – perhaps he is very relieved that today’s outage, which affected more than 1,000 companies and affected millions of Internet users, had nothing to do with it.
The places hit by the outage vary widely. It has taken over major social media platforms like Snapchat and Reddit, banks like Lloyds and Halifax, and games like Roblox and Fortnite.
AWS is an American giant with a large global footprint, and has positioned itself as the backbone of the Internet.
It provides the tools and computers that enable about a third of the Internet to function, provides storage space and database management, saves companies from having to maintain their expensive setups, and connects traffic to those platforms.
This is how they sell their services: Let us take care of your business computing needs for you.
But today a very common error occurred: a common type of outage known as a Domain Name System (DNS) error.
People who work in the technology industry will pay attention now.
This common mistake can cause a lot of chaos.
“It’s always DNS!” It’s something I hear a lot.
When someone clicks on an app or clicks on a link, their device is essentially sending a request to connect to that service.
DNS is supposed to act as a map, and today AWS has lost its bearings – platforms like Snapchat, Canva and HMRC were all still there but couldn’t see where to direct traffic to.
These errors occur for a number of reasons.
It is usually a maintenance issue or server failure. Sometimes it’s human error, someone misconfiguring something, or in extreme cases a cyberattack – although there’s no evidence of that yet.
AWS said this happened at its massive data center factory in Northern Virginia, its oldest and largest location.
A group of experts said that today is a clear example of the dangers of putting all your eggs in one basket in terms of service provider – AWS is giant and millions of companies depend on it.
And they’re right, but the problem is that there aren’t many alternatives at the sheer scale that AWS provides.
In fact, there are only two main contenders, both from other US giants: Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
Smaller competitors include IBM and Chinese company Alibaba. Supermarket parent Lidl launched a European rival called Stackit last year, in direct competition with Amazon.
But AWS remains the dominant player by some margin.
Some argue that the UK and Europe urgently need to build their own infrastructure and be less reliant on the US for cloud services – while others say it is too late.
A government worker once told me that an MP had informally suggested creating a British version of AWS.
“But what’s the point?” The reply came. “We already have AWS there.”
Perhaps incidents like today highlight why it is not that simple.