An outage at Amazon Web Services on Monday took hundreds of services across the internet offline, demonstrating how the cloud service provider owned by Amazon makes the internet run smoothly.
Amazon Web Services grew out of the internal technology infrastructure that the internet retail giant built to support its diverse and often unconventional needs. That technology became very good at handling huge numbers of users doing complex, demanding, data-intensive operations, like streaming video, running web applications and storing huge amounts of information.
Once the company realized it could effectively rent these and similar capabilities to other organizations, it invested much more in them and began pitching the service to other firms.
The list of online services and apps that were down on Monday — Coinbase, Zoom, Duolingo, Fortnight and several of the games at The New York Times — reflect just how ubiquitous Amazon Web Services has become in powering the internet. It is also used by banks and, health care and transportation companies.
Amazon’s cloud-computing division has infrastructure set up all around the world, allowing companies to make their products accessible to customers across the globe. By renting the service, customers can scale up or down without having to invest in otherwise costly hardware.
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