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- Bezos Owns the Internet
Amazon has two parts: a massive retail empire that is pretty much a break-even proposition (last time I checked) and a huge cloud computing infrastructure company called Amazon Web Services (AWS) that makes a lot of money. AWS has a massive array of services, and it’s no exaggeration to say that many companies have outsourced their entire computer infrastructure to AWS, as we discovered today when this site and a zillion others shit the bed.
A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage took down multiple online services for several hours this morning, including Amazon, Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, ChatGPT, Epic Games Store, Epic Online Services, and more. Some of the impacted platforms, including Fortnite, Epic Games Store, and Perplexity had announced that they are fully recovered and back online earlier this morning, while others are still having issues.
AWS has many “regions” — giant datacenters — and this outage occurred in US-EAST-1, the OG region where a ton of sites are hosted (far more than in the list above).
I suppose after this some companies will change their strategy and at least diversify services across some regions, or some providers, but the rest of them will just sit tight and hope that it doesn’t happen again.
What certainly won’t happen is any kind of regulation that will penalize Amazon, or other cloud providers, if their services go down unexpectedly. That’s un-American.
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