The outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday was a jarring reminder of the online world’s interdependence and vulnerability. The world’s largest cloud computing platform was snarled for about 15 hours, disrupting everything from Apple to hospitals to United Airlines to Snapchat to Ring security cameras. Over 1,000 websites and apps were knocked offline.
While AWS said that the breakdown has been resolved, it left many questions about exactly what went wrong, the risks of outsourcing our technological infrastructure, and what the outage signifies about our inextricably linked digital lives. To find some answers, I spoke to Mehdi Daoudi, co-founder and CEO of Catchpoint Systems, an internet performance monitoring company based in New York City. He began working on internet resiliency and infrastructure issues in 1997.
Tanner Nau: What happened Monday?
