One of the major business and tech stories of the past decade is cloud computing in terms of the industry's growth and importance. It quickly went from a luxury for companies to a necessity in order to stay competitive. It's also allowed companies to deploy computing power at a higher scale and at a lower cost.
Of course, the dominant player in cloud computing is AWS which was initially developed internally to meet the needs of Amazon's (NASDAQ: AMZN) e-commerce business. It was so successful that the company was able to turn this into its own business for other companies. Notably, so many Internet companies (and competitors in some cases) like Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) and Zoom Communications (Nasdaq: ZM) use it to run their businesses. In fact, it could be argued that AWS could end up being worth more than Amazon's e-commerce business.
However, the general public is likely unaware of this revolution that's happened behind the scenes, and its growing importance in our lives. This could change if events like the AWS outage become more frequent as it took down services from Amazon and other companies.
Starting on Tuesday morning, there were reports that parts of Amazon's network were down or loading at slow speeds. Online, there were reports from Amazon warehouse workers, Flex contractors, and delivery drivers that they were unable to load the apps on their phones to get their assignments. Other Amazon services that were affected included the main website, Kindle books, Amazon Music, the Ring security system, and Alexa.
In terms of third-party services that rely on AWS, we saw disruptions for Disney+ (NYSE: DIS) and video games like "League of Legends" and "PUBG." Other widely-used apps that were affected were Square (NYSE: SQ), Venmo (NASDAQ: PYPL), Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN), Roku (NASDAQ: ROKU), and Tinder (NASDAQ: MTCH).
Based on the company's technical blog which provided updates, most problems were felt on the East Coast due to some server issues. The company was able to reroute requests away from these servers which was a temporary fix until the root problem could be solved. As of Wednesday, all reports indicated that the issues had been fixed.