What Does the AWS Outage Tell Us About Our Online World?
This is not the first large-scale outage in AWS’s history. Similar occurrences in 2023 and 2021 left customers unable to access airline tickets and payment apps. The likelihood is it won’t be the last.
Our reliance on major cloud vendors, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Services, leaves us at the mercy of similar future incidents. While there is no denying that these services provide vital infrastructure that would otherwise cost businesses significantly more, there are also a myriad of attendant risks of relying upon single points of failure. One issue can easily cascade into a catastrophic breach that ends up impacting a significant proportion of the internet directly, and almost all of the rest of it indirectly.
So, what is the solution? In short, there isn’t one. Most of the internet is built on the back of cloud providers, which offer scalability, flexibility, and cost savings for businesses around the world. In this climate, there is always the potential for an update to fail, a data center to crash, or even a damaging cyberattack to occur. The best companies can do is ensure their data is backed up and facilitate offline access to vital resources where possible.
