NEWS
NEWS

US East-1, or how the collapse of the Internet put half the world in check: "The network was saturated in Europe because the US failed"

Updated

The failure in Amazon's most used region highlighted the difficulties in finding technological alternatives to the United States and the global interconnection of the digital economy in the Western world


A woman tries to withdraw cash from an ATM.
A woman tries to withdraw cash from an ATM.SERGIO GONZÁLEZ VALERO

The outage of the largest region of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the number one cloud service provider, rocked the global economy yesterday in another example of the fragile dependence on the United States that the digital world suffers from. US East-1 region is the most important of all managed by the company, as it serves the East Coast and all of America, and is the area where numerous major tech companies like Epic (creator of "Fortnite"), Zoom, Canva, or Adobe have their services, something like the heart of the Internet.

However, when this area began experiencing failures early Monday morning, the chain of events that followed once again highlighted the dense interconnection between the United States and the Spanish (and European) economy and the problems it can cause. Along with the collapse of these digital tools, widely used by companies in their day-to-day operations, other local companies' applications also began to fail, for example, banking apps. These entities were further impacted by a parallel outage of Redsys, the electronic payment system, which jeopardized card transactions and, according to the company, was not related to the issues Amazon was facing.

"When services in the US went down, many companies would have Europe as a backup region. With all the demand concentrated here, Europe's capacity became saturated, causing everything to slow down or fail," describes Rafael López, spokesperson for the cybersecurity company Check Point Software.

In addition, as the first Amazon region went down, it likely concentrated many services of pioneering companies in cloud migration, explains Jorge Román, CEO of the Spanish tech company Transparent Edge.

From a technical standpoint, he explains that the initial failures in one of Amazon's database products started causing issues in identifying web domains. This created a snowball effect where there were increasing identification problems, leading to websites not functioning, causing service after service to fail, unleashing global chaos.

According to the IT incident monitoring tool Down Detector, there were over eight million error notifications related to outages linked to domains affected by AWS. The United States topped the list, but the impact was significant in countries as distant as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia, Germany, and Japan, highlighting the global scale of the incident.

In this regard, it is reminiscent of the failed CrowdStrike update that took down infrastructures worldwide just over a year ago, although its impact, despite generating economic repercussions, was not comparable. In fact, Amazon's stock rose by 1.26% at the close of this edition.

Amazon fully restored its service late Monday. The company announced that most services began to recover throughout the day, and its network operations returned to normal by the end of the day.

Following this digital mini-blackout, voices advocating the need to diversify technology providers have resurfaced in an incident that further highlighted the extreme dependence on the United States that burdens the Western economy. It is not just a matter of the top five cloud providers being American, but also that the vast majority of digital tools used by companies are American. Thus, even if a European company takes measures, such as creating data backups in different clouds and hosting its information in Europe, it remains exposed to failures like Monday's if its providers do not do the same, or if its own cloud collapses due to a massive migration from another troubled region.

"When a business designs its platform within its business continuity plan, it must assess the economic impact of such a significant outage. Basically, the exercise to be carried out is to quantify what the company loses for every minute it is offline," points out Román, suggesting that based on that, different alternatives can be considered.

Companies moved to the cloud because it offered a cheaper option than managing their data centers and also provided greater service continuity guarantees. Although at some point a future of 100% in the cloud was considered, companies are increasingly opting for hybrid environments to have greater control over their data. Now, it is a necessity to have alternatives to reduce the risks of being left out of the digital world, even if only for a few hours.