Dark cloud money glitches
Can’t turn some of my lights on at home cos is down. For some, that simply meant that their workflows were disrupted, with emails not being forwarded or weather summaries not being automatically emailed.įor others, that meant slightly more drastic problems: “smart home” owners reported losing control of their houses after the jury-rigged system they used to control internet-connected locks and light bulbs failed.
#DARK CLOUD MONEY GLITCHES OFFLINE#
Ifttt, a website which allows users to link together services from multiple providers into one seamless operation, was one of the Amazon customers knocked offline by the outage.
#DARK CLOUD MONEY GLITCHES UPDATE#
The company’s Service Health Dashboard reported everything fine across the board, until engineers managed to fix the first problem of the day and update the system to display the many, many other problems ongoing.Ī short internet outage might sound like a trifling matter – don’t we all need a little bit of time offline now and then? – but for many, the pervasiveness of the so-called “internet of things” meant downtime at Amazon affected their physical life as well as their digital one. Worse still, Amazon’s own monitoring tools were broken. It also contains a couple of other customers which helped hide the scale of the outage for many: downtime-monitoring service, which lets users see whether a particular site is offline or not, was down for everyone. The US-East region does contain some of the company’s most visible customers, however, in part because it’s the natural region for America’s largely east coast-based publishing industry. (The majority of the Guardian’s use of AWS, for distributed publishing tools, is based in Amazon’s Dublin centre some interactive visuals were hosted from Virginia, however, leading to downtime and delays). Only its “US East” region, based in north Virginia, was hit, sparing customers – like the Guardian – who use their cloud services elsewhere in the world. In part, that’s because Amazon’s data centres are distributed around the world. It took slightly longer than might be expected when a huge tranche of the net collapses simultaneously for the common cause to be diagnosed, though. Subscribers, and the wider web, first got a hint that something was up around 6pm UK time, as glitches began to hit websites and apps that use Amazon’s cloud storage and computing. When it doesn’t work, everything comes crashing down. In the last year, thecompany has pulled in profit of $2.4bn overall, but AWS alone made a profit of $3.1bn (the missing billions are a result of how much money the company continues to lose in international sales). When that model works, it works brilliantly, providing low barrier to entry for small firms needing an online presence, economies of scale for larger companies warning world-class hosting – and huge profits for Amazon itself.