Brian Shilhavy

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Crash Triggers Internet Blackout

As I recently reported, we are too dependent on the Internet, and this is just a sign of things to come. #cyberpandemic

Excerpts from CNN (https://edition.cnn.com/business/live-news/amazon-tech-outage-10-20-25-intl):

A massive Amazon Web Services outage temporarily brought down a significant number of popular internet sites and services – affecting banks, airlines, media, delivery apps and many other websites and apps.

AWS is a cloud computing provider that hosts many of the world’s most-used online services. In Amazon’s infancy, the company needed excess server capacity to ensure it had enough computing power to handle the massive amounts of traffic that came to its site during the holiday season rush. Amazon realized that during the rest of the year, it could use those servers to support other companies’ online needs, and out of that AWS was born.

Among AWS’ many offerings is DynamoDB, a database that hosts information for companies, including customer data. Amazon Monday morning said its customers couldn’t access the data stored in DynamoDB, because the Domain Name System – a kind of phone book for the internet – had encountered a problem. DNS is like an internet location engine, converting user-friendly web addresses like amazon.com into IP addresses – a series of numbers that other websites and applications can understand.

We’ve heard today from a tech expert who told us that Amazon Web Services “sits in the middle of everything.”

Lance Ulanoff, editor at the technology publication TechRadar told John Berman on CNN News Central that AWS provides a space where businesses can essentially rent the services they depend on to operate, rather than building and maintaining those services internally, which is far more costly.

“It’s like: ‘Why build the house if you’re just going to live in it?’” Ulanoff said.

Ulanoff explained that smart home devices, used by millions globally to do everything from monitor who is approaching their property to turning lights on and off, are not designed to work without the internet, despite how widely relied upon they have become.

“They just don’t work without the internet. They’re not designed that way,” he said before adding, “We’ve designed everything to work with that constant connectivity and when you pull that big plug, everything, basically becomes dumb.”

Via https://t.me/healthimpact/2774