AWS Goes AWOL: Are we Too Dependent on the Cloud?
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WTH at AWS, we need to talk about computing in the cloud pools. You're listening to Motley Fool Money.
Welcome, Fools! I'm your host, Tim Beyers. With me, our longtime Fools, David Beyer and Tom King. It's great to have you both here. So, guys, just a few hours ago, recording on Monday morning, Amazon Web Services suffered a pretty catastrophic outage in one of the eastern U.S. regions. and businesses that offer essential digital services have taken a hit here. This isn't the first time we've seen AWS go down, and it's not going to be the last, especially with the scale of the AI build-out of which AWS plays a pretty big part. So quick reactions here first, and Tom, I'll start with you. Are you at all surprised by this news? Why or why not?
I'm not. You know, this is a complicated system, and in a complicated system, little things can compound. So it's almost inevitable that something like this would happen. It's very similar to what happened with CrowdStrike last year. Remember when CrowdStrike caused that big outage? You know, it recovered from that. It got on. It is the cost of how things are these days.
Yeah. I mean, that's a fair point. I mean, these, these things are made up of like those, you know, we've seen these commercials before Dave, where you have the dominoes all lined up and you hit one of those dominoes and they all start falling. Like what's your reaction to this?
To be Frank, I'm surprised it's not happening more. Really, really think about this. Like this was an outage. Something bad happened, there was an outage for a few hours, everything's getting back online, everything's back up and running. This is a massive system. The fact that it has the reliability that it does is an engineering marvel. So, yeah, I get it. It's disappointing. Thank goodness it happened at 3 a.m. Eastern Time. I don't know exactly how much traffic is flowing through there. I remember in my backyard in Northern Virginia, 35% of the world's internet traffic used to flow through my backyard at peak times. I'm not surprised. But quite frankly, I'm impressed how quickly they recovered it. And I'm surprised it doesn't happen more.
Maybe it does, and we just don't feel it.
I don't know if there is a Jeff Bezos shakes head approvingly meme, but I think you'd be getting that right now, Dave. I mean, it is interesting. So let's talk about this. AWS going dark again. This has happened many times. Here's what we know. AWS, like you said, Dave, went offline around 3 a.m. Eastern time for what appears to have been a couple of hours. The rolling effects could continue, and we are recording this on a platform called Riverside. And as soon as I logged in, we got a nice little notice from Riverside saying, hey, AWS went down and services may be affected. I'm paraphrasing there. So lots of companies have been affected here. At issue were some errors in the company's DynamoDB database.
So let me just briefly explain what this is. Amazon's primary database is DynamoDB. It's a transactional database. And it's most famous for being the homegrown Amazon database that they use really to process transactions. So this is meant to be a highly resilient, highly replicated database throughout the Amazon and the Amazon Web Services ecosystem. This is what they've built their business on. And what it was subject to, we don't know if it was an attack or just an error, it was subject to an outage in the DNS system, the domain name server system. When that happens, when the DNS goes out, and you probably have heard of this, a distributed denial of service attack, that's meant to attack the DNS.
If you do that, if you take down the DNS, it's like you having your phone and suddenly all your contacts, you can't pressed to call anybody because your contacts are frozen. The phone book in your phone just no longer works. You can't call anybody. When the DNS is down, that's what happens. The DNS determines when you say google.com, there's an underlying IP address that's a series of numbers, and it translates google.com to those numbers.
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