Source: Cailian
Financial Associated Press, October 22 (Editor Xia Junxiong) Amazon's cloud service AWS finally returned to online after a full day of downtime. The accident affected companies and institutions around the world, causing millions of websites and applications to be paralyzed.
Analysts pointed out that Amazon's reputation as a reliable cloud service provider has suffered a blow, and the company may lose some market share as a result, but it won't hurt its muscles and bones.
Some analysts said the crash was Amazon's worst outage since 2021. This is yet another reminder of the risks inherent when critical computing and Internet services are over-reliant on a few cloud computing companies.
According to Amazon, the outage originated in the company's data center in Virginia and the problem was related to the Domain Name System (DNS) and Amazon's DynamoDB database service.
This is not the first time that the Internet has been paralyzed on a large scale due to problems with major cloud service providers around the world. Service outages at one of the world's top three cloud computing companies-Amazon, Microsoft and Google-will almost always have a global knock-on effect.
Amazon AWS had an outage in 2023, causing the website to go offline; In 2024, an erroneous update from the American network security company CrowdStrike also paralyzed some of Microsoft's cloud services on a large scale.
The industry landscape is still difficult to shake
For Amazon, this incident occurred at a crucial moment when AWS faced challenges.
Sales growth in AWS is slowing, and it’s hard to keep up with the two major competitors, Microsoft and Google, when it comes to sales of AI tools.
AWS remains the world's largest cloud service provider, and it is difficult for customers to easily change providers, especially in today's data center capacity is tight. Despite this, in recent years some companies have begun to try to reduce their reliance on a single cloud provider.
Analyst Anurag Rana said: "This outage may push customers to be more inclined to spread their infrastructure among multiple cloud services, which may be a positive for smaller vendors such as Google."
But Rana also pointed out that due to the complexity of cross-cloud migration and industry-wide capacity constraints, this incident is unlikely to cause Amazon to lose significant market share.
Allowing big companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google to keep the internet running has indeed brought many benefits, such as huge resources and standardized infrastructure; but at the same time, it also brings serious problems, as this Monday said, when one of them comes out, the world will “off line.”
Although large enterprises and government agencies often rely on multiple cloud service providers to prevent downtime, small and medium-sized enterprises and organizations are often unable to bear the cost of multiple cloud services, so their risk exposure is higher.