It’s 11:50 p.m. on October 20th, and students across the United States fought desperately to submit their midterms on Canvas until it simply went down, frustrating procrastinators nationwide. Many students, as well as users of many social media websites including X, TikTok, and Snapchat, were all left hanging as the Amazon Website Services, or AWS, shut down. This was a catastrophic event for many using the internet and revealed a severe weakness in the infrastructure of our World Wide Web, particularly in the obvious claims Amazon has staked in a massive amount of major websites. The reliance we have on Amazon to run so many different websites that we depend on shows a concerning aspect of our society that is underlooked until it comes to points like October 20th.
It should first be made clear what exactly went down that day, and what services rely on AWS besides just our beloved streaming services or Amazon itself. Although Canvas is mainly an American-used company, this shutdown was a worldwide affair. Internet services such as Verizon and AT&T went down, resulting in many internet issues and shutoffs for many of their users. As a result, one shutdown disrupts businesses just as much as students or teachers. This outage was centered around the United States and the West, but when massive search engines like Google and their services are down, it shows the massive amount of dependence that everyone has on Amazon to maintain the internet services we use every single day. The last time a significant Google outage occurred, where services and the search engine itself experienced issues, the internet traffic worldwide went down by 40%, which happened in 2016. This event occurring prior to the pandemic and the massive shift towards online services and devices to do work and go to school failed to show how insane this outage was for citizens now.
Other services, such as cloud computing for files and other important documents which should be saved safely revealed that some information was gone, resulting in many businesses and working people to lose their important information as well as having to lose money in repairing these issues. With the impact of the Amazon Website Services outage out of the way, it should be addressed why exactly this is more concerning and not something that should be overlooked as a one-time mishap.
It is made clear to many that AWS is one of the best at doing their job in cloud computing. Mass amounts of information is stored and saved in moments, and provides almost 200 services to companies and regular people that want to create their own website or use some of these, such as saving files or searching up AI providers. However, with so many companies relying on Amazon Web Services, even discreetly, creates a new weakness for all of them. After all, it is not just companies and businesses that need Amazon – it is also the government and the military. Many federal aspects also rely on AWS, including military bases that store private information on people and events there. If an outage occurs again that is man-made rather than a result of a mistake, what could possibly happen to our country?
The outage itself feels like a simple mishap or discrepancy in the near-perfect performance of AWS for as long as it’s been up. However, the fact that it took hours to discover the issue, nevertheless recover their services, shows a growing problem that we may have in the future with how much everyone needs the internet in this sense. Amazon spreading over all of these services and completely dominating the cloud computing market is indicative of the historic issue the world has had with the presence of monopolies. If everyone is relying on one company to do everything, provide everything, and to control it all, what happens with another outage? This event has hopefully created an epiphany in services and even government sources that need it to show that AWS should not be the only option. Over a week later, it seems many have moved past it, and even forgotten that it occurred. However, the implications will only become more apparent as time goes on, if their growth is left unchecked.
