Blog

The outage affecting Amazon Web Services, a cloud service provider, points to an overreliance on a centralised system to power the internet.

Amazon’s cloud-computing division has infrastructure set up all around the world, which allows companies to make their products accessible to customers everywhere.

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. 

“This highlights how reliant we are on centralised services,” says Alp Tolker, founder and director of internet watchdog Netblocks. “The internet isn’t designed to be this way. 

“But what’s emerging is that even within their decentralised infrastructure… one weak link has the ability to take out these different services.”

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.

“We need to visualise these trees of dependencies, which hasn’t been done formally until now,” says Toker.