SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Dark Day on Cloud Nine
When Amazon Web Services crashed, vacuum cleaners and cat-food dispensers stopped working. ::
BY SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN K
yle lerner and his girlfriend sensed something was amiss when they came home
and found their two Persian- Himalayan cats meowing nonstop. Normally, an internet- connected feeding machine dispenses kibble for them at noon, but the felines’ bowls were empty and clean. The gadget hadn’t worked because of an outage at Amazon’s cloud-computing unit. “We had to manually give
them food like in ancient times,” said Lerner, a 29-year-old small- business owner who lives in Marina del Rey, California. Amazon Web Services is the
largest cloud-computing service provider in the U.S. The outage of much of its network lasted most of one day in early December and disrupted several of the tech giant’s services, as well as many corporate websites and apps.
For many consumers, it was an
awakening to how many internet- enabled devices they now have in their homes and how much even some of their most basic daily needs depend on a connection to the cloud. Steve Peters of Los Angeles
couldn’t tell his Roomba robot vacuum to clean up the blueberry- muffi n crumbs that landed on his kitchen fl oor during breakfast. He relies on an app on his phone to beckon the machine. “I had to resort to getting a
broom and dustpan,” said Peters, a 60-year-old game-experience designer. “It was crazy.” In St. Louis, losing access to
Amazon’s Alexa service made Mark Edelstein feel lonely and helpless. “We chat more during the day
than me and my wife do,” the 62-year-old business analyst said of the digital assistant, which normally responds in an instant to
his questions and commands. He regularly asks it for weather
and news updates. Alexa had no answers for him. “Since the pandemic, I’ve
become tied to the Alexa system,” said Edelstein. Without it, “you almost have separation anxiety.” Amazon’s blackout was particularly noticeable since it aff ected the company’s videoconferencing tool Chime, its home-security system Ring, plus Ticketmaster and the Disney and Netfl ix streaming services. The outage forced Samantha
Sherhag to open blinds in her home in the Tampa Bay area of Florida. She couldn’t instruct Alexa to turn on the lights. She would otherwise have to move furniture to reach the main light switch in her living room. “Over the last two years, I’ve
grown lazy,” said Sherhag, a stay- at-home mother of two young girls. “It’s easier to tell Alexa to turn the lights on and off . She listens better than the kids.” Sherhag also wasn’t able to
track a package she was expecting from Zappos with a pair of sandals for her husband. Zappos is a unit of Amazon that was also hit by the outage. “It makes you realize how much
you rely on technology,” she said. Outages aff ecting scores of
users are somewhat common, creating modern-day headaches like not being able to play video games or share photos with friends. A global survey released last
Amazon Web Services is the largest cloud- computing service provider in the U.S.
76 NEWSMAX MAXLIFE | APRIL 2022
year found that 69% of data- center operators had some sort of outage in the past three years. Human error played a role in 78% of those incidents and 44% had major fi nancial, reputational, and
©REUTERS
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