Why the Internet Broke While You Were Sleeping: Amazon Web Services Outage Explained

On December 7th, 2021, Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the world's largest cloud computing platforms, experienced a widespread outage that disrupted numerous websites and online services. The outage, which lasted for several hours, affected a wide range of popular platforms, including Reddit, Roblox, and Ring. The AWS outage was caused by issues within the company's US-EAST-1 region, which is one of AWS's largest and most heavily used data centers. This region hosts a significant portion of the internet's infrastructure, including many high-profile websites and applications. The impact of the outage was significant, with hundreds of sites and services becoming inaccessible or experiencing severe disruptions. The incident highlighted the reliance of the modern digital landscape on a small number of centralized cloud providers, and the potential risks associated with such concentration of power. While the exact causes of the outage are still being investigated, the incident serves as a reminder of the importance of robust and diversified cloud infrastructure to ensure the resilience and reliability of the internet.