AUSTIN (KXAN) — “I woke up and it’s like, **** hitting the fan, so to speak,” said Stefanie Schappert about the October 20 Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that rippled through the internet. Apps were down. Websites stopped on an error screen. **** hit the fan.
AWS is the world’s largest cloud service for hosting websites. A third of all websites on the internet use it. Everything from Snapchat to AT&T to McDonald’s use AWS for their websites.
“Think of it like a giant toolbox that companies use. They will store data in it. They use it to operate their applications software, basically, so that they don’t have to have the computers on site.” said Schappert, a senior journalist with Cybernews.
Shortly after midnight on October 20, an issue with an AWS server in Virginia caused the outage. While Amazon fixed many issues early in the morning, many others took hours to restore. By midday, companies like Duolingo and Snapchat still had issues.
Breaking the bones of the internet
“Today the cloud services are backbones of the internet. Every almost every business is using, cloud services because it is quite cheaper,” said Dixon Tang, an assistant professor with the University of Texas at Austin.
Dixon said that many businesses rely on these services to reduce overhead. For instance, a business could rent additional server space during the holidays while business was booming and then end that rental the rest of the year.
These outages have happened before and companies have had to adjust. Jake Sullivan, founder of Austin-based marketing company Vector3, produces commercials inside the video game Roblox.
“When we’re filming, we’re all in a call over the internet, and we basically join a server of a Roblox game. So we’re all in this one video game, and we have one person who has the ability to film inside of that game just by flying around and basically having the features that you would have on a normal camera,” Sullivan said.
His company has produced commercials that run inside the game for brands like ESPN, Nikki Minaj and Hugo Boss.
When an outage occurs, filming stops. This has led to missed deadlines. “There’s a loss of revenue and there’s a loss of time when we do it, and it can throw our entire schedule off as a company,” Sullivan said.
His company has had to make adjustments, being more organized to prevent impacts from an outage. “How can I make it take 30 minutes to start a filming session instead of three hours so that if there is an outage, we lose less time and less revenue as a result,” Sullivan said.
One ‘internet’ company to rule them all
Sullivan said the reliance on these companies can be a problem. Amazon’s AWS holds 30% of the cloud market. The next nearest contributor, Azure, holds 20% with Google Cloud owning 13% of the market.
“When we build on these platforms, we become reliant on them for our livelihoods. And the challenge there is, I have no control over if Roblox or another platform goes down,” Sullivan said.
Schappert said another issue with these outages is they can leave people open to scams. Banks also dealt with the outage and criminals could use the opportunity to take advantage.
“They might [send out] blanket emails with social engineering attacks or phishing attacks preying on people’s panic. ‘Oh, my God, what does this mean? I can’t take out money. I can’t, you know, access my files’,” Schappert said.
Her advice is simple. “Avoid making major transactions. Just hold off until you hear that everything’s back up and running.”
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