Amazon Web Services<\/a> describes itself as \u201cproviding industry-leading cloud capabilities and expertise\u201d. \u201cAmazon Web Services is the world\u2019s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud, enabling customers to build anything they can imagine,\u201d its website reads. \u201cWe offer the greatest choice of innovative cloud capabilities and expertise, on the most extensive global infrastructure with industry-leading security, reliability, and performance.\u201d<\/p>\nThe jargon and puffery might be a little much, but it\u2019s also a reflection of the importance and complexity of Amazon\u2019s business. In more straightforward terms, Amazon Web Services offers the infrastructure that powers the web: computers, data centres and other technologies that are hired out to companies so that they can show us the Snapchat messages and games that we ask for.<\/p>\n
It has been a very successful business. As could be seen in the widespread nature of the outage, many companies rely on AWS: it is the biggest company of its kind in the world, competing with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, and the money it makes now makes up the majority of Amazon\u2019s profits.<\/p>\n
That growth has come in large part because it makes life so much easier for companies. When they are building an app or a website, they don\u2019t need to commission data centres filled with computers at the same time \u2013 they can instead just hire them as they need them from Amazon, which in turn is able to be more efficient as a result.<\/p>\n
It also means that it is largely reliable. Amazon\u2019s terms require it to try and ensure that its services are up at least 99.99 per cent of the time, and it achieves that aim.<\/p>\n
But the tiny sliver of time in which it breaks \u2013\u00a0and when that in turn breaks the internet \u2013\u00a0can be disastrous. That means that outages of this kind often lead to more philosophical questions about whether the internet\u2019s infrastructure should be more broadly spread out.<\/p>\n
The problem at Amazon Web Services appears to be related to the Domain Name System, or DNS, usually referred to as the \u201cphone book of the internet\u201d. When a person types an easily-remembered web address into their browser \u2013\u00a0www.the-independent.com, for example \u2013\u00a0DNS is used to translate that into the actual address where the required website can be found.<\/p>\n
The way that works is a reflection of the communitarian, perhaps somewhat utopian vision of the internet that guided the early years of its development. The system is spread across the web and across the world, allowing for the interlinked nature of the internet to work.<\/p>\n
But it is exactly that sense of a distributed web that has been somewhat lost in recent years \u2013\u00a0and which means that outages like those seen at AWS today are rare but dramatic when they happen. The technologies that underpin the internet have become concentrated in a relatively small number of companies, allowing for increased efficiency and economies of scale but also balancing a large part of the internet on a relatively small surface.<\/p>\n
Even companies that are big enough to operate their own infrastructure have run into problems with centralisation. In recent years, for instance, Meta has come to bring together the technology that powers its app \u2013\u00a0Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and more \u2013\u00a0so that they are much the same on the back end. But that has meant that those rare outages at the company bring down all of its products, at the same time.<\/p>\n
And the centralisation problem isn\u2019t limited to web infrastructure. Last year, when a bad update from Crowdstrike was pushed to Windows computers, it took down a whole host of things that aren\u2019t directly related at all: hospitals, airlines and physical stores. But they had all been using the same cybersecurity protections, and so all broke at the same time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":213304,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[1638,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-213303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-internet","tag-internet","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213303","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=213303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}