Cloud computing network of Amazon faced a major outage on December 7, 2021. The outage disrupted the services in a wide range of companies in the United States for more than five hours. The latest outage has indicated how the business has become dependent on internet and how important it has become to keep it going. The outage at the Amazon Web Services affected the Easter United States but put an impact on the airline reservations, auto dealerships, video streaming services and payment apps.
Even the publishing system of the Associated Press was affected as it remain inoperable for most of the day and was not able to publish its news reports. Despite all the major outage and the disruption caused, Amazon did not clarify anything as to what exactly went wrong. On the other hand the company preferred to limit its communications on December 7, 2021 and avoided to give any technical explanations. But it did deliver a brief statement through spokesperson Richard Rocha, who acknowledged the outage and confessed that it affected its own warehouse and the delivery operations. Rocha added that it was working towards resolving the issue as quickly as possible.
Nearly five hours after a number of companies and other organizations reported about the issues, Amazon on its AWS status said that it had mitigated the underlying problem that was responsible for the outage. Some of the affected companies took a longer time to check their systems and restart their services. The Amazon Web Services was earlier run by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and the cloud services operation is a major profit centre for the company.
Apart from the businesses and major entities, it is still unclear if the outage has affected the federal government. To study this, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said that it is working with Amazon to understand any potential impacts of the outage that might have on the federal agencies or other partners.
Photo Credits: PCMag
