‘It’s surprising that one thing affected their network, because usually there’s backup, and redundant systems all running at the same time. One particular system going down is very, very surprising.’
Knight admitted he was puzzled by the outage which, he noted, will have cost Amazon hundreds of millions of dollars.
It began at 3:11am ET. By 5:01am ET the problem had been identified, and a ‘fix’ deployed within 20 minutes.
Yet it remained unresolved and, at 8:48am ET, Amazon issued another update saying further fixes were being carried out.
The specter of a cyber-attack has inevitably been raised but, according to Knight, this is unlikely.
He explained: ‘A cyber professional like myself, or whoever is currently looking at it, would be able to see if it were a hack. It’s called an indication of compromise, an IOC.
‘We’d see maybe a malware signature; some sort of unauthorized access; something in the logs showing that there’s some sort of access gained, or some anomalous traffic. There’s nothing to indicate that here.’
What’s more, he said, Amazon is legally required to disclose any hack.
Instead, the company has said that the problem derived from their site in Virginia, known as the US-EAST-1 Region.
Their last big outage was in 2021 – a sign, Knight said, of the actual resilience of AWS’s systems. But problems, when they happen, can be devastating.
In July 2024 cybersecurity company CrowdStrike went down for several days, causing the largest-ever IT outage in history.
The glitch itself only lasted for 90 minutes, but it took some companies days to recover. One insurer calculated that the issue cost Fortune 500 businesses alone more than $5 billion in direct losses, with airlines and hospitals hardest hit.
Telecoms company AT&T found its network unavailable several times last year, with a particularly damaging 11-hour meltdown in February.
Knight said it is a sign of the times, and something we simply have to learn to live with.
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