The ??? ??internet got a sucker punch on Tuesday. And no, it wasn't another DDoS attack.
This time instead of hackers, it was Amazon. The tech giant that ships every product imaginable around the world in two days also quietly runs what seems like half the internet. And on Tuesday afternoon, Amazon Web Services went down.
Amazon Web Services is a cloud-computing service that offers networking and content delivery, cloud storage, security services and the technology behind the Internet of Things. High-profile companies and websites — Snapchat, Netflix, Intuit — all pay for and rely on AWS to run.
What broke on Tuesday was S3 — a data storage service for the web. Amazon says that S3 is built for "99.999999999 percent durability," but on Tuesday we got the 0.000000001 percent.
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Companies rely on S3 for their analytics, for backup and disaster recovery, for depositing bulk data and for serverless computing. Giphy, some functionalities in Slack, media websites, Quora and even Is It Down Right Now were all down during the AWS outage.
AWS is where Amazon makes a huge chunk of its money. The web services provider brings in at least $11 billion a year, Quartzreported in October. Even Snapchat, which had relied on Google's web services, said this month it would spend $1 billion on AWS. That revenue has propped up Amazon as the company loses money on some of its other endeavors.
And most of the time, AWS runs smoothly, bringing in the big bucks for Amazon while everyone who doesn't look at the backend of the internet forgets it exists.
But the AWS outage reminded a lot of people that oh yeah, maybe it's not a great idea for one company to run big chunks of the internet.
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As of 4:50 p.m. ET on Tuesday, the internet was still malfunctioning. Hey, has anyone checked out Google Cloud Storage?
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