Monday was a chaotic start to the work week when hundreds of companies suffered outages related to using Amazon AWS. Elizabeth Warren put the company on blast, declaring the incident a wake up call.
Videos by Suggest
Taking to social media, Warren highlighted the dangers of being too reliant on one company. Warren suggested that the incident proved that Amazon has too much of a stranglehold in the tech industry.
“If a company can break the entire internet, they are too big. Period. It’s time to break up Big Tech,” Warren wrote on X.
Hundreds of sites and apps went down on Monday morning. Frustrated users flooded social media (assuming they could access it) with reports of being unable to access their favorite apps. These included everything from Snapchat to Reddit to security apps like Ring. Other apps affected also included Zoom, Slack, Venmo, Coinbase, Hulu, WhatsApp, and Microsoft 365.
Amazon Experienced Outages
Soon, it became apparent that all these sites and apps used Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) vast cloud network. The software experienced a widespread outage with “multiple AWS services” with error rates.
“We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. This issue may also be affecting Case Creation through the AWS Support Center or the Support API. We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause,” Amazon wrote.
“Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause. We will continue to provide updates as we have more information to share, or by 2:00 AM.”
Amazon quickly traced the cause to a data center in Virginia. They went to work on fixing the problem. Experts offered their own advice on the matter.
“Amazon had the data safely stored, but nobody else could find it for several hours, leaving apps temporarily separated from their data,” said Mike Chapple at University of Notre Dame. “It’s as if large portions of the internet suffered temporary amnesia.”
But that didn’t stop people from experiencing frustrations and perhaps fear of it happening again.