What Is Amazon Web Services?
The cloud-computing division of the internet giant is used by thousands of internet customers, many of whom reported disruptions on Monday.
An outage at Amazon Web Services on Monday took hundreds of services across the globe offline, demonstrating how extensively the internet relies on the cloud service provider owned by Amazon to run smoothly.
Amazon Web Services grew out of the internal technology infrastructure that the internet retail giant built to support its diverse and often unconventional needs. That technology became very good at handling huge numbers of users doing complex, demanding, data-intensive operations, like streaming video, running web applications and storing huge amounts of information.
Once the company realized it could effectively rent these and similar capabilities to other organizations, it invested much more in them and began pitching the service to other firms.
The list of online services and apps that were down on Monday — Coinbase, Zoom, Duolingo, Fortnite and several of the games at The New York Times — reflect just how ubiquitous Amazon Web Services has become in powering the internet. It is also used by banks and, health care and transportation companies.
Amazon’s cloud-computing division has infrastructure set up all around the world, allowing companies to make their products accessible to customers across the globe. By renting the service, customers can scale up or down without having to invest in otherwise costly hardware.
In the first half of the year, Amazon Web Services accounted for nearly 20 percent of Amazon’s sales, but about 60 percent of its operating profit.
Melissa Eddy is a Times reporter based in Berlin who reports on Germany’s politics, businesses and economy.