On Tuesday morning, October 21, senior Anna Kim, who is taking the computer science capstone class, tries to log into her school account. However, she fails and is greeted by an error message.

Kim said she didn’t expect such an outage would affect her classes.

“In the morning, I opened the app to check my Schoology, but I was shocked when it wouldn’t connect,” Kim said. “At first, I thought it was a problem with my home Wi-Fi, but it wasn’t until I got to my first period CS Capstone class that I realized it was an AWS issue. After hearing that apps like Schoology and Infinite Campus were also experiencing issues, I was especially worried about assignments due tomorrow or the day after, especially those that required Schoology.”

Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud computing platform, had a worldwide outage on Oct. 21. AWS is widely used by businesses, schools and government agencies to store data and run applications. According to market research firm Gartner, AWS accounts for 37% of the global cloud market.

The outage temporarily disrupted major websites and applications such as Schoology, Infinite Campus, Venmo and Snapchat. According to Downdetector, a website that aggregates user-submitted reports of disruptions to online services, there were more than 17 million outage reports.

AWS said the outage was caused by a DNS error, the internal domain name system, which prevents applications from finding the exact address of the cloud database used to store users’ data. The error began in a data center in Virginia, USA.

Kim also said the AWS outage revealed the vital role of cloud systems in education.

“I knew about AWS’s scale and role through my CS Capstone course, but this experience was the first time I realized how many apps and websites in our daily lives are cloud-based,” Kim said.

Computer science teacher Christopher Bell said AWS has a huge influence on schools.

“Schools rely heavily on cloud-based services,” Bell said. “Lesson plans, assignments, gradebooks and more are used daily, so it is challenging when these services are unavailable. Luckily, most teachers and students were logged in to their Google accounts when AWS services went down, so daily lessons were not overly affected.”

Bell also said the outage reveals how dangerous monopolistic global power can be to society as a whole.

“While the AWS outage only had an impact for one day, for some small businesses, that lost day of work and revenue is meaningful,” Bell said.

Similarly, Economics teacher Eric Bloom said outages like the AWS one have a large impact on small businesses.

“There are two primary problems,
Bloom said. “First when services fail, there are immediate and real losses: businesses can’t do transactions, open stores, contact customers and each other. Secondly, there is loss of faith that AWS can deliver what they are charging for and stop looking for other solutions”

In a Reuters article, Jake Moore, the global cybersecurity advisor at European cybersecurity firm ESET, said the AWS event reveals weak infrastructure.  

“This outage once again highlights the dependency we have on relatively fragile infrastructures,” Moore wrote.

Additionally, Kim said she hopes to take this example as an opportunity to learn and improve.

“Witnessing firsthand the vulnerabilities of AWS, which I’d assumed I trusted because it was Amazon, made me realize that there’s still much research to be done in computer science, especially in the cloud,” Kim said. “This incident demonstrated that it goes beyond a simple service disruption and impacts countless people’s daily lives and learning.”

With this in mind, Bell said students should view technology and the cloud with both appreciation and awareness of its imperfections.

“I think students should appreciate the engineering marvel that works 99.9% of the time, but understand that the Cloud is a complex, physical system,” Bell said. “This system relies on hardware, software and human input, making absolute perfection impossible. Outages will happen, but hopefully we will continue to learn from outages and make continual improvements resulting in a more resilient system.”

To him, Bloom said this incident is a reminder that any oligopolistic market can be efficient and potentially dangerous.

“That means we have fewer choices,” Bloom said. “And because it was so disruptive, it created opportunities for rival firms to steal market share. When a market is like web services, with huge start up and operating costs, there may not be many firms who are willing and able to enter and compete. Think of airlines. A few big firms with lots of smaller ones – it’s really competitive and fares always rise in the summer. (Cloud-based services) probably need some oversight to maintain competition and redundancy to prevent a similar breakdown in the future.”

Moving forward, Bell said he’s curious to see how the industry continues to evolve.

“Most services have migrated to the cloud, and we will see even more migrate in the future,” Bell said. “What will be interesting to see is if this latest outage will result in a change in cloud strategies. With over $2 trillion being invested in AI and new data centers over the next couple of years, we might see some changes in how the cloud is structured and the global power it holds.”