(Bloomberg) — Amazon.com Inc.’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 Inc. to McDonald’s Corp. to Epic Games Inc.
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.
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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 Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, grab new business selling artificial intelligence tools.
AWS remains the world’s largest cloud provider and is hardly the first to suffer an outage. Moreover, it’s not easy for customers to jump ship, especially given the current capacity crunch at data centers. Still, in recent years, some companies have sought to reduce their reliance on a single cloud provider.
“The outage will likely fuel customers wanting to spread their infrastructure between multiple clouds, which could be a positive for smaller vendors like Google,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana. Still, he said, it’s unlikely to result in any meaningful market share loss for Amazon due to the difficulty of shifting work between clouds and industrywide capacity constraints.
Amazon essentially invented the business of renting computing power at a large scale, stuffing data centers around the world with its own purpose-built hardware. AWS services, including data storage and database management, underpin a large chunk of the internet and account for about a third of the cloud market. So when bad things happen, chaos can spread quickly — as it did on Monday.
At first, it seemed as though Amazon had gotten a handle on the outage relatively quickly. The company said it discovered a malfunction in a digital directory for a key database service. That caused cascading failures when software reliant on the data trove was unable to retrieve information.
