Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: A major outage at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) last week disrupted a large portion of the internet, taking down apps, websites and online tools used by millions of people around the world, before services were eventually restored, reports Al Jazeera.
The hours-long breakdown of the cloud system that supports a portion of the internet revealed just how much of modern-life depends on the infrastructure – from banking apps and airlines to smart home devices and gaming platforms.
What caused the outage?
The problem started in one of AWS’s main data centres in Virginia, its oldest and biggest site, after a technical update to the API – a connection between different computer programmes – of DynamoDB, a key cloud database service that stores user information and other important data for many online platforms.
The root cause appears to have been an error in the update that affected the Domain Name System (DNS), which helps apps find the correct server addresses. A DNS works like the internet’s phone book, turning website names into the numeric IP addresses that computers use to connect to servers.
Because of the DNS issue, apps could not find the IP address for DynamoDB’s API and were unable to connect.
As DynamoDB went down, other AWS services also began to fail. In total, 113 services were affected by the outage.
What is a cloud?
A cloud is a way of storing and using data or programmes over the internet instead of on computer or other physical storage devices.
When people say something is “in the cloud”, it means the files, apps or systems are running on powerful computers (called servers) in data centres owned by companies like Amazon (AWS), Google or Microsoft, not on a personal device.
In this case, AWS allows companies to rent computing power and storage. It supplies the technology that runs websites, apps and many online services behind the scenes.
One of AWS’s core services is DynamoDB, a database that stores important information for companies, such as customer records.
AWS is the biggest cloud service provider in the world.
Cloud outages are not rare, but they have become more noticeable as more companies rely on these services every day.
“The fallout impacted people across a number of different spheres,” Joshua Mahony, the chief market analyst at Scope Markets, told Al Jazeera. [But] of course this kind of comes with the territory with tech companies; the key is they can resolve it quickly, and it doesn’t cost them a lot of money.”
He said Amazon would likely weather the storm from the incident.
“You’re looking at something that is relatively contained,” he said. “Amazon Web Services has cornered 30 per cent of the market alone. Their users are not going to suddenly jump ship. Their businesses are deeply ingrained.”