There is a good chance you were at least inconvenienced by an outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) that crippled swathes of the world wide web for hours on Monday.
AWS, apart from its name, is one of those huge companies that largely flies under the radar among the wider public and that are crucial to the plumbing of the internet as the public interacts with it.
In essence, the company hosts thousands of websites on its servers and allows firms to outsource the maintenance of their sites to AWS and other hosting services.
Businesses from a family shop to behemoths such as Reddit and Snapchat rely on AWS to keep their web pages accessible. So when AWS went dark on Monday morning, much of the internet as we know it appeared to do so, too.
The outage, which appears to have been resolved, underlines the fragility of the tech-dependent world we live in. Society in general is essentially built on the premise that we all have smartphones and easy access to web services 24/7.
[ Thousands of websites back online amid Amazon outageOpens in new window ]
Whether that be the cashless society, airlines no longer accepting paper boarding cards, banks rolling back on branch services or companies pushing so-called paperless billing to name a few, there are not many aspects of daily life where the web isn’t more or less essential.
It’s a vulnerability that is stark in the world today. While there is no indication for now that this was a deliberate act against AWS, cyber attacks are now a fact of life for businesses and governments.
For an island nation like Ireland, those vulnerabilities are perhaps even greater, especially given the well documented severing of data and electricity cables in the Baltic Sea and elsewhere.
Our reliance on the internet creates huge economic and user experience advantages, but also leaves us increasingly vulnerable to easily created problems that are difficult to fix.
