The Long Tail of the AWS Outage

Experts say outages like the one that Amazon experienced this week are almost inevitable given the complexity and scale of cloud technology--but the duration serves as a warning. A sprawling Amazon Web Services cloud outage that began early Monday morning illustrated the fragile interdependencies of the internet as major communication, financial, health care, education, and government platforms around the world suffered disruptions. As the day wore on, AWS diagnosed and began working to correct the issue, which stemmed from the company's critical US-EAST-1 region based in northern Virginia. But the cascade of impacts took time to fully resolve. Researchers reflecting on the incident particularly highlighted the length of Monday's outage, which started around 3 am ET on Monday, October 20.