If yours is one of the thousands of businesses that rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS for short) then you're already aware that recently there were issues.
Even if your business doesn't rely on AWS directly if you do business with anyone who does rely on Amazon's Flagship digital service you're probably at least aware of the recent problems.
At around 10:30am eastern time on December 15th, Amazon's Web Services began experiencing difficulties. As a result, every business relying on AWS likewise began experiencing difficulties. Communication from Amazon has been sparse to this point.
The most substantial message we've received from them so far was:
"We have resolved the issue affecting Internet connectivity to the US-WEST-1 Region. Connectivity within the region was not affected by this event. The issue has been resolved and the service is operating normally."
The good news is that for now at least the problem seems to have been resolved. Unfortunately, we don't yet have any details about what caused it, what Amazon did to fix it, or how likely the issue is to crop up again in the days and weeks ahead.
It matters because this is the hands-down busiest time of year for many if not most businesses around the world. If things aren't firing on all cylinders during the Holiday Season it could spell disaster for entire industries which could send the global economy into a tailspin.
Given that we've only just begun to climb out of the economic pit the pandemic threw the world's economy into, that would be doubly awful.
Amazon is normally better than this at communicating with the masses so we expect we'll be hearing more from the company quite soon. When we do here's to hoping it was a one-off that we won't have to worry about again!
