Amazon says an issue which affected its cloud computing services unit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is now “fully mitigated” . Picture: iStock
Amazon says an issue which affected its cloud computing services unit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is now “fully mitigated” after being hit by an outage affecting users across the globe.
The outage disrupted several popular websites and apps across the world, including Snapchat, Facebook and Fortnite.
Resolution
Reports suggest that even a number of major international banks have been affected by the outage.
The maintenance site for AWS said it took some three hours for engineers to largely fix the problem, which they first noticed when “increased error rates” hit multiple services.
“We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS Services,” the company’s status page reads. “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.”
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Problem
AWS said the problem appeared to originate in a critical AWS infrastructure zone, the US-East-1 region, located in the northern part of the US state of Virginia, according to AFP.
The outage showed “how reliant we all are on the likes of Amazon, as well as Microsoft and Alphabet for many of the online services we more or less take for granted,” said financial analyst Michael Hewson.
“On an economic level it’s almost akin to putting all of your economic eggs in one basket.”
Internet outages
There have been several mass internet service outages in the past five years where problems with one company have had huge knock-on effects.
Most of the time these issues are resolved in a few hours as engineers scramble to reverse mistakes or fix things on the fly, according to the BBC.
Experts have long pointed to the growing reliance on a small number of internet giants being a factor as more eggs are placed in fewer baskets – when one big company has a glitch, much of modern life and business comes to a standstill.
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