A monstrous outage from Amazon Web Services crashed down Netflix, Reddit, Tinder and other major websites, sending netizens in fury for missing movies, hook-ups and other fun online activities.
AWS powers web and mobile applications, and provides data processing and warehousing, storage and archiving to websites all over the world.
Instead of building their own data infrastructures, countless important online marketers place their trust on the cloud services offered by Amazon to lessen their long-term investments in the volatile e-commerce industry.
The practical move, however, makes these ventures vulnerable to external situations outside of their control, as is the case when AWS, including CloudWatch, Cognito and DynamoBB, crashed. Cloudwatch is a monitoring system for the apps that run on the platform, Cognito is a service that saves mobile data, and DynamoDB is the company's NoSQL database.
The outage of the three important applications interrupted the online dating conversations of Tinder users who were planning their dates. Netflix watchers also had to cancel their movie time.
The disruption began at 6 AM (EDT) of Sept. 20. At 11:30 AM (EDT) of the same day, Amazon reported a service recovery.
"The metadata service is now stable and we are actively working on removing throttles," Amazon wrote on its status page.
According to the status page, at the company's huge US-East data center complex in Ashburn, Virginia had some glitches. The center is the company's oldest public cloud infrastructure. Typically, once a service like this is disrupted, the restarting and recovery takes time.
In 2013, another AWS outage took down several websites, including photo applications - Instagram and Airbnb. Buzzfeed estimated that Amazon would lose about $1,100 per second from the glitch.
Amazon runs huge data center farms around the world, which provides a highly reliable, scalable,and low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of businesses in 190 countries around the world.
