DIGITAL INSIGHTS: Not Appreciated Until It’s Gone
Monday's AWS outage is reminder of just how critical the internet - and the data centers that drive the internet - are to our society and economy.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Digital Insights is a weekly feature usually appearing on Thursdays that explores the role of data centers in our region. These columns will focus on four areas: tracking the development of data centers in our area, exploring projected and actual tax revenue trends, explaining what data centers are and how they affect our daily lives, and reporting on research and emerging trends in the industry. These columns are made possible, in part, by a grant from Stack Infrastructure.
Former governor of Indiana Mitch Daniels once said, “You’d be amazed how much government you’ll never miss!”
In the context of the internet and the data centers that make it possible, however, the inverse is true: “You’d be amazed how much you’ll miss data centers when they aren’t working properly.
As our community prepares to see a number of data centers opening in the coming years, it helps to remember just what these businesses do and how central they are to the American economy and its society.
On Monday, we all got a reminder of how critical well-functioning data centers are to our business and social lives.
Around 3:15 a.m. EST on Monday morning, the site DownDetector began recording significant issues with internet services offered through Amazon World Services. Nearly 70% of the reported issues occurred in the US-East-1 region, which includes the data centers in Loudon and Prince William counties.
The Advance was affected because the platform we publish from — Substack — runs parts of its service through AWS. Among the problems our team has wrestled with throughout the day were minor annoyances like delays in reporting data about open rates, and more challenging issues like delivering stories to our readers that are scheduled for publication.
Air travelers were also affected by the issues at AWS. Delta airlines and United Airlines customers “reported that they were unable to pull up reservations, check-in online or generate mobile boarding passes. Others even reported struggling with bag drops. Airline websites as well as apps for Delta, United, and, for a brief period earlier today, Southwest Airlines, experienced outages,” according to SimpleFlying.
SnapChat and Reddit users also experienced delays and were at times unable to access these popular social media channels.
Online payment platforms Venmo and PayPal were also affected. According to DownDetector, Venmo registered more than 1,600 complaints early Monday morning, before soaring to more than 8,300 complaints around noon. Paypal showed a similar pattern, with a smaller number of complaints early Monday morning, with complaints spiking beginning around noon.
The real impact, however, comes down to dollars and cents.
In a quote for CNN Business, Mehdi Daoudi of Catchpoint estimated that the financial impact of today’s disruption “will easily reach into the hundreds of billions due to loss in productivity for millions of workers that cannot do their job, plus business operations that are stopped or delayed — from airlines to factories.”
That number isn’t hard to imagine when Amazon itself posted about the problems it’s having on its homepage: “We’re sorry if you’re currently experiencing issues using the Amazon site. We’re working to fix this as quickly as possible.”
In 2024, Amazon did just north of $391 billion in sales, or slightly more than $1 billion a day.
The big online platforms weren’t the only one affected. That pain is being felt locally, too. Just one example has been the impact on local restaurants “using toast restaurant POS system,” said Cori Blanch who owns Curitiba on Caroline Street. He noted that the outage is keeping him “locked out of [our] back end,” meaning he can’t see any analytics like sales. (Editor’s Note: Blanch sits on the Advance’s board.)
Mary Washington Health Care reported that “The Amazon Web Services east coast data center outage has not caused any major interruptions to MWHC’s operations. MWHC’s main systems, including electronic medical records, remain protected and are functioning as normal,” said spokesperson Emily Thurston in an email.
Atlantic Union Bank posted a message to its customers on its mobile app that the AWS outage could also potentially affect their access to online banking services.
Concerns about the rapid rate of data center development are understandable, but today’s event is a reminder that data centers are as crucial to the global economy as the power lines that bring energy to your home, or the pipelines that bring gas to local service stations, and the highways that allow us to move freely across the country.
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