Yesterday there was a fall in Amazon Web Services infrastructure which affected a multitude of services. Many AI tools did not work, nor did games like Fortnite or Roblox, streaming platforms, applications and much more. Additionally, at the same time there was a failure in the Redsys system (according to the company, unrelated) that left all payment services in Spain out of play. It’s not the first time this has happened and it doesn’t look like it will be the last. How can we prepare?
Amazon falls. The failure occurred around 9 a.m. (Spanish time) at the AWS data center in Northern Virginia and caused a global butterfly effect. The DownDetector home screen showed a Dantesque panorama; Dozens of well-known services were experiencing downtime around the world. AWS reacted quickly and a couple of hours later they were already up and running their systems.
And Redsys. Around 11 in the morning, the dataphones, Bizum payments and even the ATMs also began to fail. At first we attributed it to the AWS failure, but according to Redsys it had nothing to do with the Amazon Web Services failure. Regardless of whether it was a coincidence or not, for a few hours many people were left without access to their money and Redsys is the main payment service provider in Spain and one of the most important worldwide.
Cash. In the case of failure of ATMs and dataphones, the solution is obvious: carry cash for what may happen, a habit that many of us do not have. In addition, it is also advisable not to keep all the money in the same bank, for example having a savings account separate from the rest for emergencies. Yesterday wouldn’t have been of much use, but if only our regular bank’s system had failed, we could access the other one.
Diversify. As with money, it is not advisable to put all your eggs in the same basket in the case of the apps and services we use. The biggest problem may be if one of these outages affects communication services as happened with WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook in 2021. In this case, it is best to have an account in other apps through which we can stay in touch. In fact, that time Telegram was the big winneradding no less than 70 million users.
Dependence. The fall of Amazon Web Services is an example of the enormous dependence on the cloud, a sector in which Amazon is the undisputed leader with a 31% market share. It is followed by Microsoft Azure with 20%, Google Cloud with 12% and Alibaba Cloud with 4%. The pie is shared among very few companies and, if one fails, the impact is very great.
It’s happened before. In September 2015, Amazon Web Services suffered another “blackout”” that affected many services such as Netflix, Reddit, Medium, Tinder and more. Already then the enormous dependence on Amazon’s cloud was evident and what happened yesterday makes it clear that the situation remains the same and even worse. Redsys also experienced a drop two years ago it affected bank payment systems. The dataphones, some ATMs and other services such as Bizum did not work. The situation was quite similar to what occurred yesterday.
There have been more cases, such as last year’s Crowdstrike crash. Microsoft’s cloud-based cybersecurity platform knocked out the systems of airports, hospitals, and many more companies.
And it will happen again. Fortunately it is not common, but errors of this type they happen all the time. The problem is when they occur in such large infrastructures on which so many services depend. Yesterday’s error on AWS occurred in the service that is responsible for distributing traffic among its servers, but also may come from other causes such as faulty updates or incompatibilities.
Image | Markus Spiske, Pexels
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