Amazon AWS outage breaks internet
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) had a bad day. That's how the boss of another big US tech firm Cloudflare put it – probably feeling very relieved that Monday's outage, hitting over 1,000 companies and affecting millions of internet users, had nothing to do with him.
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The whole thing led to further complications that kept websites offline for a good chunk of the workday. That outage has a lot of people talking about how fragile our systems are.
The outage underscored a central trade-off of cloud computing: while it lets businesses deploy global services without maintaining vast infrastructure, it concentrates risk. A problem in a single region—like Northern Virginia—can cause widespread, simultaneous outages for unrelated companies worldwide.
Since a large portion of the internet depends on AWS, the outage cascaded across major firms in disparate industries, leaving some people unable to access airline information or make everyday purchases, Qi Liao, a professor of computer science at Central Michigan University, told ABC News.
A major outage caused by an issue at Amazon Web Services affected hundreds of websites, games and apps, including Amazon, Snapchat, Fortnite and several banks. Amazon says it fixed the underlying problem but a full recovery will take longer.
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