01-10-22 | Blog Post
Amazon’s Nightmare Before Christmas
It’s fair to say that the Holiday Season was particularly rough on Amazon Web Services (AWS) this year. Three separate outages in December brought anything but cheer to users of popular apps and services like Netflix, Venmo, and Ring Security Cameras. These outages also impacted their delivery business – causing confusion in warehouses and stalling holiday deliveries. In all likelihood, even you were impacted by these outages one way or another.
It all started the first week of December, when an outage at Amazon’s data centers disrupted many critical internal apps. These apps are used to control the technology used in warehouses, track the status of moving packages, and also to communicate and direct delivery drivers. Obviously, a disruption to these systems is going to have a massive effect on operations – and whether or not gifts make it under the tree in time!
Just as Amazon was wrapping up a post-mortem on this first incident, they were the victim of another outage, this time affecting servers hosting popular apps like Twitch and DoorDash. To make matters worse, the outage also impacted Xbox, Nintendo and PlayStation online networks, angering gamers around the world who were eager to log some hours over the holiday season.
To further estrange themselves from the gamer community, a THIRD outage a few days before Christmas impacted Epic Games, the maker of the video game phenomenon, Fortnite, as well as other popular apps like Disney+ and Slack. This caused for a change in plans for those who were looking forward to spending their holiday break on the couch.
Properly executed cloud strategies and solutions can prevent such outages from having such heavy consequences. A combination of cloud services, including BaaS, DRaaS, Security and Colocation can mitigate the risk of cyberthreats and catastrophes , and is vital to any organization’s business continuity strategy. Speaking of – when was the last time you evaluated yours?
These three cases are great examples of the rippling consequences that befall large cloud providers and their clients. Customizable, flexible solutions that are unique to each unique business is what’s necessary for the best cloud experience. Not to mention that chances are slim you’ll be able to reach a real person when you need them most (when “it” hits the fan…) if you are dealing with a company like AWS, IBM or MS Azure. Personalized cloud solutions from Otava give you complete transparency and control over your data, which also means speaking to a real person whenever you need to, even just to say hi (we love that!). It’s what we call, the personal cloud experience.
For additional information on how to you can avoid cloud outages and keep peak system performance, check out our What the Tech video on the subject below.
If a personal cloud experience is what your organization is after, then let’s get in touch today. An Otava rep is standing by to answer your questions and tailor a cloud solution that is unique to your business – all you have to do is fill out the form using the link below:
