The first sign that things weren’t right was a little after 9am this morning. I have a regular networking meeting on Zoom – nothing too serious just a great way of kickstarting the week – and only the host and I could get access.
The updates on the WhatsApp group were that everybody else was getting an error when trying to join in.
A quick visit to Google revealed the culprit to be a problem with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Not too much of a big deal you might think, so what if nobody could buy a new toaster? But, the thing is, AWS is the infrastructure behind 100s of websites, including some serious players.
Snapchat: down. Bank Of Scotland: down. BT: down. HMRC: down. Lloyds Bank: down. WhatsApp: down.
All of these major websites and services down because of a problem with a single supplier.
AWS – and this is the simple version, so no snotty emails from IT geeks please – is a consequence of Amazon needing more. More speed. More reliability. More power, than they could find from a third party supplier. So they built their own systems. And then, realising they were on to a good thing, decided to sell it to other people.
And thus was an industry born.
When issues like this occur – as they have in the past with systems such as Cloudflare and Google Cloud knocking out great swathes of the Internet in June – it makes us all realise both how reliant we are on Internet-based systems and also how much they often rely on a single service provider.
When AWS gets a cold, the rest of the Internet starts sneezing.
(Subtle sales pitch) One thing I do with my consulting clients is look for these single points of weakness, and help them to mitigate the effects of a worst case scenario. If the loss of any Internet-based system would adversely affect your business, isn’t it worth taking a little time to plan for the possibility?