How the Amazon Web Services’ Crash Affected Users

Many of us can’t live long without access to Amazon. With its fast delivery, ability to stream shows and movies, comprehensive storage, and so many other services, it’s hard to imagine life without Amazon. But that’s just what happened when Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Simple Storage Service started experiencing issues in 2017. To start, the storage program started experiencing “high error rates” in Northern Virginia data centers.

More Than Amazon Was Affected by the Outage

Amazon’s outage is important because AWS is such a major player on the market. AWS is the biggest cloud computing server now available, with more than 40 percent of the market and a revenue of $12 billion dollars in 2017. This might not have been such a problem if so many websites and applications that use AWS weren’t knocked out. Many websites and apps use Amazon, including popular sites like Expedia, Medium, and even the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Here’s How the Outage Affected Users

During the outage, Amazon posted the following update messages, as AWS was up and down throughout the day: “We’re continuing to work to remediate the availability issues for Amazon S3 in US-EAST-1. AWS services and customer applications depending on S3 will continue to experience high error rates as we are actively working to remediate the errors in Amazon S3.”

So how did the AWS affect users?

Most use AWS S3 storage system as a virtual hard drive. They store documents and files on the cloud to protect themselves if their computers or devices fail. Overall, the storage system had three to four trillion pieces of data stored in it, meaning that many users feared that their data was lost. Or, at the very least, users couldn’t access their files very promptly during the outage.

AWS users found the outages frustrating, to say the least, and some people called the outage a “digital snow day.” Overall, the outage lasted for around 3.5 hours, but some users had problems for even longer.

What Will happen in the Future?

Additionally, some users’ favorite apps and websites were affected by the outage. For example, some sites went down entirely while others had many broken links. Additionally, AWS-supported products, like Nest’s smart thermometer, had issues, as well. Luckily, AWS came back full force soon after the outage, but it does make one wonder: when so many sites are powered by the same cloud, what will happen if a similar outage happens again?

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