(NewsNation) — Monday’s massive Amazon Web Services outage sent ripples across the internet that could have a long-lasting global impact and a price tag in the billions.
The official financial impact is unknown as of yet, but the hourslong outage stalled many of the world’s most frequently used online services.
It was the largest internet disruption since last year’s Crowdstrike outage, which affected millions of Windows devices and caused about $5 billion in losses.
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AWS outage downs social media, websites, school systems
AWS, a cloud computing provider, serves as a backbone for many major companies as well as state and local governments.
From social media and food delivery apps to financial and streaming services, the outage was felt on every corner of the internet. Some college campuses had to figure out alternatives when online courses and materials weren’t available for hours.
Approximately 2,500 companies worldwide were reportedly impacted by the outage. AWS did not announce a full “return to normal operations” until 6 p.m. EDT on Monday.
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Amazon blamed the massive outage of its cloud computing service on a glitch in the Domain Name System, which works as an online phone book.
Jason Hogg, executive chairman of cybersecurity company Cypfer, told NewsNation the issue prevented users from reaching the sites despite them being up and running.
“When they made this configuration setting, what ended up happening is it wasn’t able to dial up and provide the traffic when people were trying to connect to the websites,” Hogg said.
He said AWS will likely release an after-action report, compiling information and a transaction value to try to determine the exact financial fallout.
Outage exposes global reliance on a handful of providers
Cybersecurity expert Thomas Hyslip pointed to the drawbacks of having just three major cloud providers — Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
“Millions of corporations have switched to using those systems, but it inherently adds vulnerabilities. When everyone switches to one system, right?” Hyslip said. “You have this, as we saw yesterday, the single point of failure on one major AWS data center.”
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Having a majority of applications and websites rely on a few cloud providers opens up the internet to widespread outages — a relatively new possibility.
“The internet was originally designed to be decentralized and resilient, yet today so much of our online ecosystem is concentrated in a small number of cloud regions,” Rob Jardin, chief digital officer at cybersecurity firm NymVPN, told CNN.
“When one of those regions experiences a fault, the impact is immediate and widespread,” he added.
NewsNation’s Anna Kutz contributed to this report.
