In the past three weeks, two major outages at Amazon's cloud computing service led to widespread disruptions at other online services. In June, a service configuration issue at cloud CDN Fastly took countless sites offline, and in November of 2020, anAWS outage affected clients like Apple.
The internet, despite all it's capable of, is sometimes fragile. Customers of DoorDash and other websites complained that they couldn't connect. The problems were traced to Amazon Web Services, the most widely used cloud services company, which reported that two of its 26 geographic regions were experiencing problems. A similar disruption took place on December 7, disrupting video streams, internet-connected robot vacuum cleaners and even shutting down pet food dispensers in a series of reminders of how much life has moved online. An apology and detailed description of what went wrong was published by the company.
The incidents helped to blow up the illusion that consumers can rely on online services to be available without fail, reinforced by decades of steadily improving internet speed and reliability. One of the founding ideas of the internet was that a distributed system can mostly continue functioning even if one piece goes down. They said the problems are caused by the fact that certain data centers are more important than others, and that cloud businesses run by Amazon, Microsoft and others concentrate more power.
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Sean O'Brien, a lecturer in cybersecurity at Yale Law School, said the outages call into question the wisdom of relying on big data centers. "The cloud has never been sustainable and is just a euphemism for a centralized entity controlling network resources," he said. He wrote that the big cloud providers were a "feudal" system.
Vahid Behzadan, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of New Haven, said that there are many points of failure that would affect the internet. The fact that we've had repeated outages in a short period of time is cause for alarm.
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Some companies are looking at using multicloud solutions. The professor from New Haven says that the outages may encourage businesses to take the plunge.
The internet will live on. The internet makes it stronger if it isn't killed.
