Amazon’s web service is said to be the largest cloud provider in the world.
(Photo: AP)
new York A massive outage at Amazon Web Services on Tuesday affected many people, universities and companies who use their cloud services for hours. The Associated Press news agency was also affected, resulting in a broadcast failure. An internet and network expert said he suspected a technical glitch was more likely to be behind the malfunction than a cyber attack.
One hour after the failure, Amazon announced that the cause had been identified and that they were “actively working” on remedying the malfunction. Information about the cause of the disruption was not given, as AP announced on Twitter at 6:18 p.m. CET. It was still not fully resolved by late Central European Time.
The web service from Amazon – AWS – is the largest cloud provider according to the internet expert Doug Madory from the network analysis company Kentik. Its largest data center, us-east-1, is located on the US east coast. On the east coast, the failure began in the morning, local time. “Any interruption there has a major impact on many popular websites and other Internet services,” he said.
He doesn’t suspect a hacker attack is behind the disruption, Madory said. Previous disruptions with other large website providers showed a pattern of how the networking industry had evolved.
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“More and more of these malfunctions turn out to be a product of automation and centralization of administration,” said the expert. “This leads to disruptions that are difficult to completely avoid because of the operational complexity. They are very effective when they happen. “
At the airline Delta Airlines, the booking system via AWS failed on the east coast. She apologized to the customers and recommended booking through her website or mobile app.
According to Down Detector’s incident observer, services like Instacart, Venmo, Kindle, Roku and Disney + were affected. Toyota reported the failure of its salesman services in the eastern United States, including apps to resolve warranty claims.
Netflix was also affected
The streaming service Netflix and many Amazon services such as Alexa and Prime Music were also affected. AWS provides servers, storage space, e-mail and numerous other services, as the Canadian news portal Global News explained.
Down Detector reported more than 24,000 incidents. Amazon localized the malfunction on a programming interface – API. Amazon services for security cameras, the smartphone banking APP Chime and the vacuum cleaner manufacturer iRobot are also affected.
In response to the AP Twitter message, users wrote that they could not use their Amazon apps. Many suspected an attack by cyber criminals, others connected it to the video conference held on Tuesday by US President Joe Biden with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the Ukraine crisis.
“We’re in a hotter war than some people think,” wrote one. “I guess the cloud was hacked?”, Another. And another: “It would be great if you didn’t have to rely on a single company for so many things.”
It was unclear whether the US government was also affected by the disruption. The agency for cybersecurity and infrastructure security announced on AP request that it had approached Amazon “to clarify the potential effects of this disruption on federal authorities or other partners”.
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