What to know about the Amazon cloud outage that exposed the internet’s vulnerable backbone

A massive internet outage resulting from errors in Amazon’s cloud services Monday morning demonstrated how many people rely on the corporate giant’s IT infrastructure every day — and laid bare the vulnerabilities of an increasingly concentrated system.

But despite its ubiquity, most users don’t know what the cloud is or where it is.

Here’s what you need to know about the Northern Virginia data centers where the outage occurred, and what the malfunction reveals about a rapidly changing industry.

Cloud computing is a technology that allows businesses to remotely access massive IT equipment and services without having to purchase and maintain physical infrastructure.

In other words, companies ranging from Snapchat to McDonald’s are essentially renting Amazon’s physical infrastructure located all over the world to operate their own websites. Instead of building expensive IT systems in-house, companies rely on Amazon to store data, develop and test software, and deliver applications.

Amazon is the leading provider of cloud infrastructure and platform services, accounting for more than 41% of the market, according to market research group Gartner. Google and Microsoft are the next biggest competitors.

Although the cloud seems like an abstract, formless entity, its physical location is important: the proximity of cloud data centers determines how quickly users can access Internet platforms.

Amazon Web Services has only four cloud computing hubs in the United States, according to its website. These are strategically located in California, Ohio, Virginia and Oregon to provide fast services to users across the country.

A user’s distance from the hub affects how quickly they can access the platforms.

“If you wait a minute to use an app, you won’t use it again,” said Amro Al-Said Ahmad, a professor of computer science at Keele University in England.

The Northern Virginia region, where Monday’s problems originated, is the nation’s largest and oldest cloud hub.

In fact, the Virginia cluster, known as the US-East-1 region, is responsible for “several orders of magnitude” more data than its nearest cluster in Ohio, or even its larger West Coast hubs, said Doug Madory, director of internet analytics at Kentik. The idea of ​​a large cloud provider like Amazon is that organizations can distribute their workloads across multiple regions, so it doesn’t matter if one of them fails, but “the reality is that everything is very concentrated,” Mr. Madory said.

“For a lot of people, if you’re going to use AWS, you’re going to use US-East-1 no matter where you are on planet Earth,” Madory said. “We have this incredible concentration of IT services hosted in one region by a single cloud provider, for the entire world, which presents a fragility to modern society and the modern economy. »

Servers are not located in a single building.

Amazon has “well over 100” sprawling IT warehouses in Virginia, mostly in the suburbs on the edge of the Washington metropolitan area, said Lydia Leong, an analyst at Gartner.

Leong said one of the reasons Amazon is Amazon’s “most popular region” is that it is increasingly becoming a hub for managing artificial intelligence workloads. The growing use of chatbots, image generators and other generative AI tools has driven up demand for computing power and led to a boom in the construction of new data center complexes in the United States and around the world.

A report released Monday by TD Cowen says major cloud computing providers leased a “staggering” amount of data center capacity in the United States during this year’s fiscal third quarter, equivalent to more than 7.4 gigawatts of power, more than all of last year combined.