The day Amazon broke the internet for millions of Americans

illuminem summarises for you the essential news of the day. Read the full piece on The Wall Street Journal or enjoy below:

🗞️ Driving the news: An Amazon database glitch disrupted services for millions of Americans, highlighting the fragility of global internet connectivity and the central role Amazon plays in supporting much of the online infrastructure
• The outage affected a wide range of services, including Alexa, Slack, Zoom, Venmo, and financial trading platforms, causing significant inconvenience across homes and businesses

🔭 The context: The disruption stemmed from a failure in one of Amazon’s critical databases, leading to widespread outages for services that depend on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• This event serves as a reminder of how interconnected and dependent much of the global internet infrastructure is on a few major providers, like Amazon, making the system vulnerable to disruptions.

🌍 Why it matters for the planet: The outage underscores the potential risks to businesses, education, and day-to-day life that stem from centralized internet infrastructure
• As cloud services become more essential to our digital economy, reliance on a handful of providers increases the potential for widespread disruption, highlighting the need for diversification in cloud computing and digital infrastructure to ensure resilience and security

⏭️ What's next: While Amazon has since worked to resolve the issue, the incident raises questions about the stability and security of the internet infrastructure that underpins much of modern life
• Companies and governments may consider revising strategies for digital resilience and investing in more decentralized or diverse solutions to reduce the risk of such large-scale outages in the future

💬 One quote: “A glitch with an obscure Amazon database disrupted life for millions of people across the U.S., as core internet services failed to function.” – Robert McMillan, The Wall Street Journal

📈 One stat: Amazon Web Services (AWS) powers much of the internet's infrastructure, and its outages can impact thousands of online services simultaneously, as seen with the recent disruption.

See on illuminem's Data Hub™ the sustainability and resilience ratings of Amazon and its peers including Microsoft, Google, and Oracle

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