Amazon’s cloud clout hit after 15-hr global outage

Amazon's reputation as a reliable provider of cloud services took a hit on Monday when an outage lasting some 15 hours disrupted the operations of hundreds of companies, ranging from Apple to McDonald's.

- Bloomberg

The company said it discovered a malfunction in a digital directory for a key database service.

(AP)

The incident, which some analysts are calling Amazon's worst outage since 2021, reminded the world of the perils of depending on a handful of cloud companies to deliver crucial computing and internet services. Outages like Monday's strike at a core premise of the cloud: that a centralized operation full of sharp engineers will keep servers running better and more efficiently than individual companies’ own staff.

The breakdown occurred at a challenging moment for the Amazon Web Services cloud unit, which has long touted reliability and accountability as a core piece of its pitch to customers. Sales growth has slowed, and AWS has struggled to keep up as its two biggest rivals, Microsoft and Google, grab new business selling artificial intelligence tools.