Copyright birminghammail
A huge global outage occurred earlier today, with millions of customers impacted across the globe. While no reason for why so many companies were down has been confirmed, the outage is believed to have been linked with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The cloud system is thought to have potentially faced a glitch, and as it underpins a significant number of other business, including HMRC and Lloyds, this could have lead to problems at firms across the world, but an exact reason for the outage has not yet been confirmed by the company, the Guardian reported. So, without further ado, here is an explanation of what AWS is and why it is so important. READ MORE: Drivers issued fines through letterbox after 'not realising law has changed' To put it simply, AWS works as a platform offering virtual IT infrastructure like servers, storage, and databases over the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis. The technology is used to easily handle spikes of traffic, manage reliability and even help with cost-efficiency. AWS' website says it works by "enabling customers to build anything they can imagine" on its cloud platform, adding it "offers the greatest choice of innovative cloud capabilities and expertise, on the most extensive global infrastructure with industry-leading security, reliability, and performance." To put into perspective how important the technology is across the globe, the AWS Global infrastructure currently spans 120 Availability Zones within 38 Geographic Regions, with announced plans for 10 more Availability Zones and 3 more AWS Regions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Chile, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. AWS is particularly used to deliver the first cloud-native services for compute, serverless, storage, and relational databases, and the first fully managed, end-to-end machine learning suite. Other benefits AWS is said to have includes an organisation's ability to "modernise faster, scale more efficiently, and maintain competitive advantages through access to cutting-edge technologies and industry-specific solutions." Its website also defines its security as "security you can trust," adding it is "the most secure cloud computing environment available today." The web page states: "AWS helps meet the unique security requirements of the most sensitive workloads, trusted by government agencies, financial institutions, and healthcare organisations worldwide." READ MORE: Major global internet outage with Amazon, Snapchat, Alexa, Ring, HMRC DOWN AWS is the chosen cloud operational platform behind numerous businesses as it offers multiple benefits as mentioned above. Most crucially, the digital aspect means a brand can grow rapidly without large upfront hardware investments and the high costs associated with it. Innovation is said to be faster, but hundreds of firms are reliant on the smooth operation of AWS in order to function optimally. This has been allegedly seen today, with companies such as HMRC, Lloyds Bank and even Snapchat facing difficulties thought to be linked with the outage. In the most recent update, AWS said: "We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS Services. "We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered. We continue to work towards full resolution and will provide updates as we have more information to share." An earlier update also said: "We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests. We will continue to provide additional information."
