On Tuesday this week AWS (Amazon Web Services) suffered an outage that left several websites and services down for hours. This was not the work of hackers or a DDoS attack though, it looks like the S3 service took a nose dive on the east coast which caused even isitdownrightnow.com (a site dedicated to letting you know if a website is down or if it’s just a problem on your end) to be unavailable.
Services like controlling your Nest thermostat, to reading your favorite magazines through Texture, to finding the perfect reaction GIF on GIPHY were all unavailable for several hours. With AWS bringing down several giant companies, you have to wonder how “cloud” is the cloud? You place your files on a cloud based server, which gives you access to them from any location. When that service goes down, though, where will your data be?
One way to prevent being the victim when a major outage like this occurs is redundancy. This outage affected one of S3’s sites. There are several other companies that also host their websites and services through AWS that were not affected. Copying your data to multiple locations can be extremely costly though. You have to weigh how much will you lose by being down, and for how long with how much it will cost to have your data stored in multiple locations. Although maybe after this Amazon will make that a little easier to swallow.
This also brings up the very valid point about if one company controls most of the internet, what happens when the company crashes? I don’t know about you, but I don’t know how to survive having to use physical maps again.