On Monday, Oct 20th, AWS (Amazon Web Services) had a temporary full shutdown caused by a malfunction with the services that managed it -- Leo pyskacek -- 8th grade
On Monday, Oct 20th, AWS (Amazon Web Services) had a temporary full shutdown caused by a malfunction with the services that managed it. The incident caused around 5,000 different apps to stop working.In this article you will learn about Amazon’s web service monopoly, (AWS), and why monopolies are bad, as well as my opinion on all this.
The bug that led to the shutdown was caused by two systems trying to write the same information on a website page. The systems kept deleting each other's work which caused the page to appear blank. This then started a chain reaction, knocking down many popular websites. The bug lasted for 15 hours with Amazon engineers scrambling to fix it. The problem came from the US-EAST-1 region. This is one of the most important cloud hubs around the world and is a backbone for a large part of the internet.
This clearly exposes a big problem with Amazon. It has a web service monopoly that; if left unchecked, could result in larger shutdowns occurring. As well as necessary applications becoming unavailable for longer, causing problems worldwide. For example, Amazon owns 30% of the cloud computing market, whereas other smaller businesses own insignificant amounts of the cloud computing market. So if other companies were to temporarily shut down, there would be a disproportionately smaller impact on the internet. If Amazon shut down huge chunks of the internet would be rendered useless. In my opinion, this is a huge problem that needs to be fixed.
Early in the morning on Oct 20th people started to report problems with popular websites, including Duolingo, Roblox, Snapchat, and many more. ”Our parent communications platform - Parentsquare - was impacted and so we had some impact when using it,” said David Smith, the Director of Technologies at OSA.
Although completely unrelated to Amazon's web service monopoly, many other businesses are invisible to the standard consumer because they can just go on Amazon instead of shopping at local businesses. Additionally, all that overreliance on one company can cause a multitude of problems. “I am concerned about its impact on small to medium businesses and their ability to reach customers” says Smith.
Because of Amazon, many small businesses, like the shops I notice in my local downtown area, are going out of business because the customers that used to buy birthday presents, medications, books, and many more now shop at Amazon. This has caused small businesses like Ma & Maw Pet Shop to constantly get put out of business.
With these businesses eliminated Amazon has little to no competition which allows for wide scaled shutdowns like the one earlier this year to continue happening.
The bug that led to the shutdown was caused by two systems trying to write the same information on a website page. The systems kept deleting each other's work which caused the page to appear blank. This then started a chain reaction, knocking down many popular websites. The bug lasted for 15 hours with Amazon engineers scrambling to fix it. The problem came from the US-EAST-1 region. This is one of the most important cloud hubs around the world and is a backbone for a large part of the internet.
This clearly exposes a big problem with Amazon. It has a web service monopoly that; if left unchecked, could result in larger shutdowns occurring. As well as necessary applications becoming unavailable for longer, causing problems worldwide. For example, Amazon owns 30% of the cloud computing market, whereas other smaller businesses own insignificant amounts of the cloud computing market. So if other companies were to temporarily shut down, there would be a disproportionately smaller impact on the internet. If Amazon shut down huge chunks of the internet would be rendered useless. In my opinion, this is a huge problem that needs to be fixed.
Early in the morning on Oct 20th people started to report problems with popular websites, including Duolingo, Roblox, Snapchat, and many more. ”Our parent communications platform - Parentsquare - was impacted and so we had some impact when using it,” said David Smith, the Director of Technologies at OSA.
Although completely unrelated to Amazon's web service monopoly, many other businesses are invisible to the standard consumer because they can just go on Amazon instead of shopping at local businesses. Additionally, all that overreliance on one company can cause a multitude of problems. “I am concerned about its impact on small to medium businesses and their ability to reach customers” says Smith.
Because of Amazon, many small businesses, like the shops I notice in my local downtown area, are going out of business because the customers that used to buy birthday presents, medications, books, and many more now shop at Amazon. This has caused small businesses like Ma & Maw Pet Shop to constantly get put out of business.
With these businesses eliminated Amazon has little to no competition which allows for wide scaled shutdowns like the one earlier this year to continue happening.
