\n Global disruption, one data centre: Outage reveals fragile internet infrastructure\n <\/p>\n
The outage affecting Amazon Web Services, a cloud service provider, points to an overreliance on a centralised system to power the internet.<\/p>\n
Amazon’s cloud-computing division has infrastructure set up all around the world, which allows companies to make their products accessible to customers everywhere.<\/p>\n
The AWS cloud spans 38 geographic regions, according to its website. But even with this decentralised set-up, there’s an inherent dependence on a small number of key locations. The outages affecting myriad apps and websites this morning were caused by “operational issues” at their datacentre in the US-EAST-1 Region centre in North Virginia, according to AWS.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“This highlights how reliant we are on centralised services,” says Alp Tolker, founder and director of internet watchdog Netblocks. “The internet isn\u2019t designed to be this way.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“But what’s emerging is that even within their decentralised infrastructure\u2026 one weak link has the ability to take out these different services.”<\/p>\n
Toker highlights how these major internet outages often serve as wake-up calls for companies to do things differently. In the case of the AWS outage, there has been a “build fast, fix later” approach. Firms that have been using Amazon’s cloud-computing services to host their data haven’t completed sufficient testing to see what their back-up options are if one datacentre goes down.<\/p>\n
“We need to visualise these trees of dependencies, which hasn’t been done formally until now,” says Toker.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Global disruption, one data centre: Outage reveals fragile internet infrastructure The outage affecting Amazon Web Services, a cloud…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":213184,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-213183","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213183\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}