Let me address the elephant in the room. No, the world didn’t end, but Amazon Web Services (AWS) which saw a major outage on October 20 that disrupted gamers, students and internet users alike. It lasted from about 3 a.m. Eastern time until around 7 p.m. that same day.
According to Amazon, the blame falls on its domain name system, the system that changes web addresses (URLs) into IP addresses, the numeric identifier given to every electronic device that gives other devices the knowledge of where to send information and allows apps and websites to load and function. Without this system, it becomes impossible for users to reach certain websites, apps and games.
To mention a few among the list of apps and sites that went down, there was Duolingo, Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo and Canvas, according to DataConomy. Even Peloton, an electric bike company, was affected by the outage, making their machines temporarily unusable. I didn’t know Amazon had such a hold on everything. I think it’s easy to forget how much of a hold big corporations have on things until something like this happens.
AWS is a leading provider of cloud infrastructure, one of the few mechanisms that make up the entirety of the internet, making it more difficult to pinpoint the source of the problem and consider it to be larger than a single app, and making it harder to realize that many problems may be connected. It also shows how impactful it is when one of these big companies goes out.
The financial impact? According to CNN, the impact will reach billions of dollars of lost profits, considering the wide range of this issue. A lot of delivery and online shopping services like Shopify, DoorDash, Etsy and of course Amazon also utilize AWS. Along with this, I’m sure there were a lot of jobs impacted by the outage as well.
We were lucky enough to have the problem fixed within the day, but imagine if it had lasted a week: Would that have been the start of a screenager apocalypse? Would there have been repercussions that were worse than losing a 200-day streak on Duolingo?
Considering Canvas is used by about 50% of colleges and universities in North America alone, according to AP News, a longer outage could have been devastating to higher education. The schools that rely on Canvas for students to take tests and turn in assignments would have had to go old school and pivot to paper assignments. Depending on how long-term the problem could have been, schools might have had to switch over to another Canvas-like application.
While this wasn’t a severe outage, something like this could definitely be detrimental to the world. We rely on the internet for a lot of things. Not just for entertainment and communication, but for finances, delivery services and shopping, all of which have people’s personal information.
We should consider how many services were impacted by one outage. We should not be so dependent on certain companies, or the internet as a whole, but with how many people that depend on online services, we can only hope something like this doesn’t happen again.
Hayley Doda can be contacted at
hayley@kscequinox.com
