Reuters
- Amazon Web Services is a cloud service offered by Amazon.
- Outages can be tracked by Downdetector and Amazon's own AWS dashboard.
- Many popular businesses from streaming companies like Netflix to Google and Slack are AWS customers.
Amazon Web Services — known more commonly as AWS — is a cloud computing service that lets businesses rent online storage and computing power as a service. Its relative affordability and flexibility makes AWS a popular resource for all sorts of server needs, including storage, data management, AI, game and mobile development, and more.
Here's more about AWS, including how to tell when your AWS system is offline or suffering an outage.
What does AWS stand for?
AWS stands for Amazon Web Services. It's Amazon's subsidiary, offering on-demand cloud computing services on a pay-as-you-go subscription basis.
Is Amazon AWS down right now?
If you're an AWS user and encountering connectivity issues, there may be an outage. A dependable way to check on the status of AWS in real time is to check Downdetector. The site's AWS status page shows a rolling graph of reported issues and an overall assessment of whether the system is up or down.
What was the last AWS outage?
While Downdetector's AWS status page can help you see all the reported AWS performance issues over the preceding 24 hours, Amazon's own AWS Health Dashboard lets you find much more granular results over a longer timeframe. If there was an outage anytime in the last 12 months, you can browse AWS by service name or region and see all reported outages. If there's a service for which you want to see real-time status notifications, you can subscribe to its RSS feed from this dashboard as well.
What companies are affected by AWS outages?
While AWS outages are rare, when they happen, they can broadly impact many users. That's because many popular websites and services rely on AWS for storage and computing needs. Popular video streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ use AWS, for example, and in recent AWS outages, those services were unavailable, or streaming was intermittent for many subscribers.
But AWS is also used by many other businesses, with roughly a third of the internet running on AWS servers, according to Statista. Fast food chains like McDonald's and Burger King briefly lost their ability to manage online and mobile app ordering in a previous AWS outage. Gamers using the PlayStation Network have been affected, as well as Slack and Google. The bottom line is that AWS outages can impact some of the largest and most popular companies.
How do I mitigate an AWS outage?
The good news is that AWS outages are rare. AWS is built on an infrastructure that allows different regions to operate independently, so an outage in one region generally does not affect others. If you subscribe to an AWS service, depending on which level of service you choose, Amazon may be bound to a service-level agreement that guarantees a high level of uptime, which can be as high as 99.99%.
Even so, as an AWS customer, you need to take steps to mitigate issues when outages occur. This includes having a robust disaster recovery plan, dependable backup strategy, and data replication that lets you rebound from outages quickly and efficiently.
Why are many businesses moving to AWS?
AWS is a compelling option for many businesses. Not only is it a global service, available in more than 240 countries, but AWS is segregated into 81 zones that allow customers to fence their services into geographical areas and scale up as needed.
Moreover, AWS is a pay-as-you-go service with no long-term contracts. It lets businesses scale as quickly (or slowly) as desired without investing in their own infrastructure. Amazon includes access to low-cost migration services to move to AWS efficiently, and billing is precise and accurate — users don't have to pay estimates or "true-up" on an ongoing basis. Instead, all payments are on a rolling monthly basis.
Finally, it's worth noting that thanks to service-level agreements, Amazon ensures certain levels of uptime while offering integrated security, privacy, and reliability guarantees. All of these elements would be costly if a company had to implement all of them on its own.