Amazon Cloud Outage Reveals Internet Fragility
A significant internet outage caused by errors in Amazon cloud services on Monday morning highlighted the extent to which individuals depend on the corporate giant’s computational infrastructure daily — and revealed the weaknesses of a system that is becoming increasingly concentrated. However, in spite of its widespread presence, the majority of users remain unaware of what the cloud actually is or where it can be found. Here is what you need to understand about the data centres in Northern Virginia where the outage began, and what the malfunction indicates about a swiftly changing industry. Cloud computing is a technology that enables companies to remotely access extensive computing resources and services without the need to acquire and manage physical infrastructure. In essence, companies from Snapchat to McDonald’s effectively utilize Amazon’s global physical infrastructure to run their own websites. Rather than investing in costly in-house computing systems, companies turn to Amazon for data storage, software development and testing, as well as application delivery. Amazon stands as the foremost provider of cloud infrastructure and platform services, accounting for more than 41 percent of the market. Google and Microsoft stand as the foremost competitors in the industry.
While the cloud may seem like an abstract and formless concept, its physical location is significant: the closeness of cloud data centres plays a crucial role in the speed at which users can reach internet platforms. According to their website, Amazon Web Services operates just four cloud computing hubs in the US. These are strategically located in California, Ohio, Virginia, and Oregon to provide prompt services to users nationwide. The distance a user is from the hub influences the speed at which they can access platforms. “If you’re waiting a minute to use an application, you’re not going to use it again,” said Amro Al-Said Ahmad. The area in Northern Virginia where Monday’s issues began is the largest and most established cloud hub in the nation. “In fact, the Virginia cluster known as US-East-1 region is responsible for orders of magnitude more data than its nearest cluster in Ohio, or even its big West Coast hubs,” said Doug Madory. “The idea of a big cloud provider like Amazon is that organisations can split their workloads across multiple regions, so it does not matter as much if one fails, but the reality is it’s all very concentrated,” Madory said. “For a lot of people, if you’re going to use AWS, you’re going to use US-East-1 regardless of where you are on Planet Earth,” he added. The concentration of IT services hosted by a single cloud provider in one region for global use reveals a significant fragility within modern society and the economy.
According to Lydia Leong, Amazon operates more than 100 extensive computing warehouses in Virginia, primarily located in the exurbs at the periphery of the Washington metropolitan area. Leong stated that one reason it is Amazon’s single-most popular region is that, in addition to being one of the oldest, it is increasingly becoming a hub for managing artificial intelligence workloads. The increasing adoption of chatbots, image generators, and various generative AI tools has resulted in a surge in demand for computing power, prompting a significant construction boom of new data center complexes across the United States and globally. A report on Monday from TD Cowen indicated that the leading cloud computing providers leased an impressive amount of US data centre capacity in the third fiscal quarter of this year, totaling over 7.4 gigawatts of energy, surpassing the total from all of last year combined.
