A widespread outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) brought parts of the global internet to a standstill on Monday, disrupting thousands of websites, apps, and online services and reigniting debate over the world’s dependence on a few technology giants to keep the digital infrastructure operational. Now, given the global impact of the outage, concerns have emerged surrounding the UK’s vulnerability to disruptions that originate in other parts of the world.
The outage originated at AWS’s US-East-1 data center cluster in northern Virginia, 8 A.M BST (midnight PDT) and caused major disruptions to popular platforms including Snapchat, Fortnite, Signal, Roblox, and Duolingo. As reported previously by w.media, over 80 of Amazon’s own apps and services like AWS Application Migration Service, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Lambda, AWS Network Firewall, AWS Organizations, AWS DynamoDB, AWS Transit Gateway, Amazon Location Service, AWS Support Center among others.
The impact of the outage was global, with its aftershocks felt across the pond in the UK.
Governments and other federal organizations have taken notice, and Dame Meg Hillier, MP Chair of the Treasury Committee wrote to the Economic Secretary asking why Amazon has not yet been designated a “critical third party” for financial services, a status that would bring tighter oversight.
She also expressed concerns over the outage being “related to its operations in the United States” and asked, “Is HM Treasury concerned that seemingly key parts of our IT infrastructure are hosted abroad?”
Experts and analysts also raised concerns about the UK’s vulnerability to disruptions originating in other parts of the world.
Cori Crider, Executive Director, Future of Technology Institute, told Euronews, “The UK can’t keep leaving its critical infrastructure at the mercy of US tech giants. With Amazon Web Services down, we’ve seen the lights go out across the modern economy from banking to communications.”
The potential financial fallout could be immense as Mehdi Daoudi, CEO, Catchpoint, an internet performance firm, told Newsweek, “The financial impact of this outage will easily reach into the hundreds of billions due to loss in productivity for millions of workers that cannot do their job, plus business operations that are stopped or delayed from airlines to factories.”
Service issues partially resolved
The service issues appeared mostly resolved when Amazon posted this update at 3:53 PTD:
The outage marked the second time in four years that AWS’s Virginia-based region had triggered a global disruption on December 7, 2021 which also affected customers whose services went down in multiple regions. The outage affected several key AWS services, including CloudWatch, API Gateway, Secure Token Service (STS), and container platforms such as Fargate, ECS, and EKS. While existing instances and containers continued to operate normally, customers were unable to modify them or launch new ones due to widespread.
Monday’s outage serves as a stark reminder of how vulnerable digital infrastructure is when the cloud falters, as does much of the modern world.