AWS goes down again. Is it time to re-assess risk in the cloud and AI-era, where so much of the digital assistance we get is housed someplace we can’t see and controlled by someone we don’t know? David Meier, Tom King, and Tim Beyers: - Discuss the failures that led to the AWS outage this morning and which companies are services were impacted as a result. - Debate whether companies have become too dependent on AWS and its peers, especially when virtually all the in-demand AI services we’re banking on are hosted in these clouds. - Play another game of Faker or Breaker with three companies impacted by the AWS outage. Don’t wait! Be sure to get to your local bookstore and pick up a copy of David’s Gardner’s new book — Rule Breaker Investing: How to Pick the Best Stocks of the Future and Build Lasting Wealth. It’s on shelves now; get it before it’s gone! Companies discussed: AMZN, LYFT, UBER, HOOD, COIN, RBLX Host: Tim Beyers Guests: David Meier, Tom King Producer: Anand Chokkavelu Engineer: Dan Boyd Disclosure: Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, “TMF”) do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement. We’re committed to transparency: All personal opinions in advertisements from Fools are their own. The product advertised in this episode was loaned to TMF and was returned after a test period or the product advertised in this episode was purchased by TMF. Advertiser has paid for the sponsorship of this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
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.
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