Amazon Web Services Outage Rocks the Internet

Amazon Web Services, the backbone for the modern internet that services one-third of the cloud infrastructure market, reported a major outage on Monday morning. The service disruption has crippled countless centralized Web2 services in its wake.

What's the Scoop?

• False Hope: Amazon previously reported the outage as "fully mitigated" at 6:35 AM EST on Monday morning, but the interruptions persisted, with outage monitoring platform Downdetector indicating increased prevalence of user-generated complaints into the afternoon.
• Core Issue: At 11:43 AM EST, Amazon Web Services identified the root cause of the outage as an issue "within the EC2 internal network" and began "throttling requests for new EC2 instance launches to aid recovery and actively working on mitigations."
• Widespread Implications: Although Amazon managed to briefly restore cloud services, the outage had crippled many Web2 applications for upwards of 9 hours at the time of writing. Downdetector showed virtually no major web-based platform unaffected, with the outage seemingly crippling everyone from Chase to Coinbase, to Roomba vacuums and Amazon itself!
• Decentralization Shines: While legacy TradFi and Web2 internet systems ground to a halt, decentralized blockchain networks like Ethereum and Bitcoin continued producing blocks at an uninterrupted pace in amid of the chaos. Globally distributed blockchain employ diversified validators sets by design to safeguard network liveness.
• Centralized Pain Points: Centralized internet has been imperiled by technical issues numerous times in recent history. In July 2024, a faulty Cloudstrike upgrade caused grounded worldwide air traffic to a screeching halt, meanwhile, AWS experienced notable outages in both 2023 and 2021.