Infra breakdown: AWS' global outage creates a moment of vulnerability

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday experienced a major global outage that disrupted several of its widely used applications and services, including Canva, Duolingo, and Snapchat.

- JAYANT PANKAJ & YASH KUMAR SINGHAL

Data by DownDetector, an online platform to provide real-time information and detect problems in various websites and services, showed over 9,000 outages been reported worldwide by 10.30 PM IST on October 20. Of these, 3.2 percent of the outage reports came from India alone.

This incident is particularly noteworthy given AWS’ dominant position in the cloud services market. In 2023, under the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model, which provides core infrastructure such as servers and storage for full control over the computing resources, AWS commanded a dominant 47 per cent global market share and an even higher 60 percent share in India. Microsoft came behind AWS both in India and the world.