AWS wreaks havoc

Hi, it’s Spencer in Seattle. Amazon Web Services outage wreaked havoc across the internet. But first… Today’s top tech news: Instagram’s chi [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Hi, it’s Spencer in Seattle. Amazon Web Services outage wreaked havoc across the internet. But first… Today’s top tech news: - Instagram’s chief will appear [before Congress]( Wednesday - Google sues [two Russians]( it claims help run a massive botnet - Meta is reorganizing its [research department]( after scrutiny over its findings The day the internet paused Amazon Web Services had one of its worst outages ever on Tuesday. The problems cascaded through the company’s retail operation—which uses software and apps that run on AWS—during the holiday shopping rush. Vans sat idle. Drivers were sent home. Packages piled up at the worst possible time. But that was just where the damage started. The failure also took down a sizable portion of the internet. Here were just a few of the problems: - Visitors to [Walt Disney Co. theme parks]( had difficulty checking in online. - Ticketmaster had to postpone selling seats to [Adele’s 2022 tour](. - Traders at home couldn’t use Robinhood or cryptocurrency platform Coinbase. - Streaming services like Netflix and Disney+ were down. - Tinder went dark. It wasn’t all bad. One colleague told me her app for the Equinox gym crashed, so she pivoted from push-ups to multiple cups of chocolate pudding. Tuesday offered the kind of jolt that reminds us how many products and services are centralized in common data centers run by just a handful of big tech companies like Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. It’s also a reminder of the vulnerability of much of the infrastructure underpinning day-to-day life online. It could still be a few days before Amazon discovers and reveals precisely what went wrong. But by Tuesday night, the company said it had resolved a [network device issue](bbg://news/stories/R3RUWYT1UM1V) that led to the outage. More information should follow, since most of the industry discloses the causes of big failures to help avoid repeats. For example, in 2017 a major AWS outage was attributed days later to an employee who goofed while trying to fix a bug in a billing system. What happens next? Tuesday’s disruptions will likely reinvigorate industry debate around “multi-cloud” strategies, an idea that a company should duplicate its services across multiple cloud computing providers so no one crash puts your company out of commission. Some, like Forrester analyst Brent Ellis, believe that will help companies side-step big web outages. “It’s a decision large enterprises have to make or they’ll inevitably be in a situation where they’re down for several hours,” he said. But other experts, like Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist at the Duckbill Group, believe that such precautions won’t work. “The idea of being in multiple clouds for resilience is a red herring,” Quinn said. “They end up going down three times as often because they now have exposure to everyone's outages, not just AWS's.” As companies try to figure out how to protect themselves from future outages, the fallout of Tuesday’s chaos for Amazon itself will likely be limited. Packages will get back on track. And customers will keep using AWS—along with other cloud providers that have suffered downtime—because it’s often still a cheaper, more reliable alternative than running similar operations in-house. In the end, periodic cloud failures have started to feel a little like a large-scale, digital version of a regular power outage: A momentary crisis, then the lights flicker back on, and you get back to your routine. —[Spencer Soper](mailto:ssoper@bloomberg.net) If you read one thing Inside Twitter’s succession planning: The new chief executive officer got the nod from Jack Dorsey [a year ago](. Here’s what you need to know Elon Musk is tangling with the White House. Musk blasted a bill that [would boost EVs]( and give credits for assembling cars with union labor. He also took a swipe at President Biden with a tweet suggesting age limits for politicians. Weibo, China’s Twitter-like website, saw its shares fall as much as 7.2% in its first day of [trading in Hong Kong](. Saule Omarova—a crypto critic and the White House’s pick to run the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency—[withdrew her name]( from consideration for the job. 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