Copyright nytimes
Experts said that the disruption showed again how the internet’s reliance on a few major technology providers — including Amazon, Microsoft and Google — can mean disruptions for millions of users when one service breaks down. Last year, a much wider, daylong internet outage was caused by a faulty update sent out by a little known cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike. Amazon Web Services counts thousands of clients who rely on it for complex, demanding, data-intensive operations, including streaming video, running web applications and storing huge amounts of digital information. Amazon’s cloud-computing division has set up infrastructure all around the world, allowing companies to make their products accessible to customers across the globe. By using Amazon’s service instead of building their own, clients can scale up or down without having to invest heavily in costly hardware. In its initial statement on the outage, Amazon’s said early Monday that 28 of its services, including those in the “US-EAST-1” region, were having issues and that its engineers had been working on limiting the effects and identifying the cause. Harry Halpin, the chief executive of NymVPN, a virtual private network service, said that the issue could have been triggered by a technical fault in one of Amazon’s main data centers. But he added that cloud platforms’ operations are inherently opaque, making it impossible to know the cause unless Amazon disclosed it, including if the cause was a cyberattack. Mr. Halpin, whose company provides VPN services to soldiers in Ukraine, said he woke up to several emails from soldiers on the front lines asking what had caused the disruption. The problem extends beyond Ukraine and applies to other Western governments, many of which rely on such cloud services, he said.
