Amazon Web Services (AWS) had a bad day.
That's what the CEO of another major US technology company, Cloudflare, put it – perhaps he was very relieved that Monday's outage, which affected more than 1,000 companies and affected millions of Internet users, had nothing to do with him.
Locations affected by power outages vary widely. It destroyed major social media platforms such as Snapchat and Reddit, banks such as Lloyds and Halifax, and games such as Roblox and Fortnite.
AWS is an American giant with a large global presence, positioning itself as the backbone of the Internet.
It provides the tools and computers that power about a third of the Internet, offers storage space and database management, eliminates the need for firms to maintain their own expensive setups, and connects traffic to these platforms.
That's exactly how the company sells its services: let us take care of your business's computer needs for you.
But on Monday, something very ordinary went wrong: a common type of failure known as a Domain Name System (DNS) error.
People who work in the tech industry will be rolling their eyes at this point.
This common mistake can cause a lot of chaos.
“It's always DNS!” this is something I hear often.
When someone clicks on an app or clicks on a link, their device is essentially sending a request to connect to that service.
DNS is supposed to act like a map, and on Monday AWS was disorientated – platforms like Snapchat, Canva and HMRC were still there, but it couldn't see where they should route traffic to them.
These errors occur for a number of reasons.
This is usually a maintenance issue or server failure. Sometimes it's human error, someone set things up incorrectly somewhere, or, in extreme cases, a cyber attack – although there's no evidence of this yet.
AWS said it happened at its massive data center plant in northern Virginia, its oldest and largest facility.
A chorus of experts said it was a textbook illustration of the risks of putting all your eggs in one basket from a service provider's perspective: AWS is a giant, and millions of companies rely on it.
And they're right, but the problem is that there aren't many alternatives at the scale of AWS.
There are really only two main contenders, and both of them are fellow US giants: Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
Smaller competitors include IBM and Chinese firm Alibaba. Last year, supermarket parent company Lidl launched a European competitor called Stackit, which will be a direct competitor to Amazon.
But AWS remains the dominant player by some margin.
Some argue that the UK and Europe urgently need to build out their own infrastructure and become less reliant on the US for cloud services, while others say it is too late.
A government official once told me that a Member of Parliament had informally proposed creating a UK version of AWS.
“But what's the point?” the answer came. “We already have AWS there.”
Possibly incidents such as Monday's massive power outage highlight why it is not that simple.
