In an age when the Internet of Things (IoT) are increasingly embedded in the day-to-day lives, reality checks in the form of technical glitches or unscheduled downtimes can serve as eye-openers as to how much we are dependent on technology. What happened with Amazon Web Services (AWS), a leading provider of cloud infrastructure technology for businesses large and small, in a part of the US for nearly nine hours last Tuesday is the latest example. For many consumers, it was an awakening to how many Internet-enabled devices they now have in their homes and how much even some of their most basic daily needs depend on a connection to the cloud.
The historic outage experienced by Amazon’s cloud-computing arm brought down many popular websites and services. Some of Amazon’s delivery operations ground to a halt, and third-party sellers could not ship products. Colleges that rely on software to host content had to postpone exams during finals week. Robotic vacuum cleaners could not be summoned. Parts of Amazon’s mammoth retail operation slowed to a standstill. The episode angered users while underscoring the severity of problems that can arise from having so much economic activity reliant on technology from just a few vendors.
AWS controlled 33% of the global cloud infrastructure market in the second quarter, according to Synergy Research Group, followed by Microsoft at 20% and Google at 10%. Revenue at AWS jumped 39% in the third quarter from a year earlier to $16.1bn, outpacing growth of 15% across all of Amazon. The AWS snafu crippled Amazon’s retail operations at a particularly inconvenient time. The company is in the middle of peak season. Third-party merchants, who make up more than half of all retail volume sold on Amazon, rely on a few weeks at the end of the year for an outsized percentage of their annual sales.
Joe Stefani, an Amazon seller in Chicago, said his business, Desert Cactus, couldn’t get inventory into the company’s warehouses due to the outage. Stefani said Amazon handles 90% of his company’s orders, shipping products to customers from its fulfilment centres. Sellers such as Stefani were unable to access Seller Central, an internal system Amazon uses to manage customer orders. That meant Stefani was unable to print out shipping labels that are required for any shipments sent to Amazon warehouses. “We could not send in at least 10,000 to 12,000 items,” including NBA and NHL merchandise, Stefani said. “It will end up costing us money in the long run.”
The outage also took down Canvas, an online teaching platform with more than 30mn users, as well as the LockDown Browser from Respondus, a test proctoring service that blocks certain web browsing functions while students are taking an exam. Other major web services and infrastructure companies have seen significant outages this year. Fastly, whose technology helps companies speed the delivery of digital content to consumers, experienced an outage in June that took down major websites including Amazon, The New York Times and Hulu. In October, Facebook suffered its worst outage since 2008 due to a configuration issue. Amazon has had its own disruptions in the recent past. AWS experienced an outage in November 2020, when problems with a service called Kinesis brought down a host of websites. This time the damage was more widespread, affecting businesses of all shapes and sizes.
Since the crisis has been resolved, discussions about alternatives will automatically get pushed to the background, only to resurface when the next outage happens. After all, technology is a double-edged sword, as it has the ability to both liberate and enslave.