AWS Outage: How to prepare for the next tech failure?

The AWS outage that occurred on the 20th October highlighted the risk faced by global tech, AI companies and tech reliant businesses broadly.

- Wesley Diphoko

THE logo of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

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Thousands of clients rely on AWS for complex, demanding, data-intensive operations, including streaming video, running web applications and storing huge amounts of digital information.

The services that were affected included WhatsApp, the British government’s website and tax services, the payment app Venmo, the cryptocurrency platform Coinbase, games at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal’s website.

Dozens of other companies and retailers — including Amazon, Hulu, Snapchat, McDonald's, Ring doorbells and the game Fortnite — also experienced interruptions. CyberCube estimated that the outage impacted more than 2 000 large organizations and around 70 000 organisations in total.

Last year, a much wider, daylong internet outage was caused by a faulty update sent out by a cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike. The challenge facing everyone is simply that there's only a few dominant players in the cloud space, that is AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud). The market needs more players.