DENVER (KDVR) — Businesses around the world and some Colorado cities used strong contingency plans to offset the effects of Monday’s worldwide internet outage linked to Amazon’s cloud computing service.
The outage affected banking, social media, online classes, ride share apps, food delivery and other services run by the system.
Amazon Web Service’s domain name system is being linked to the outage which occurred at 3 a.m. ET Monday and lasted approximately three hours. A website that tracks online outages received more than 11 million worldwide reports of problems at more than 2,500 companies.
The Via platform, which operates many Colorado ride service apps, was also affected by the AWS outage. The city of Longmont already had a plan in place to keep its ride service running smoothly.
“Technology can be as one knows can cause issues, solve problems in this case obviously it was causing problems and our contingency plan was to have a phone number in place which we shared on our social media platforms,” the city’s public information officer, Rogelio Mares, told FOX31.
Mares says city officials have regular meetings to study the best options to keep vital services online and ensure residents are quickly informed and safe in any scenario.
“The hope is that this doesn’t happen but when it does we want folks to be able to have an alternate option for being able to use these services,” said Mares.
Longmont city officials are currently conducting a survey as part of the ongoing effort to utilize the most efficient methods of sharing important information with residents.
Lone Tree’s Link On Demand service was also affected by the outage. The city immediately notified riders through the Link On Demand app and social media and kept drivers on standby.
The city of Lakewood was also hit by the outage which minimally affected a small number of users in association with Adobe document management and online video and audio applications for Municipal Court. Service to residents was not interrupted. The Lakewood Information Technology team is monitoring AWS for updates.
Internet security expert Tony Sabaj of Checkpoint Software tells FOX31 while a handful of companies hold a major percentage of the cloud computing market, safeguards are in place amid the increasing likelihood of outages.
“I think they’re definitely more common the big cloud providers like AWS, Google, Oracle and others really do build a lot of redundancy and resiliency in their systems,” he said.
While the average user will not be able to predict or control a cloud service outage, Sabaj encourages anyone using apps to back-up information and develop a contingency plan.
“If Zoom was still down maybe you would switch to you know Teams or some other format,” he said.
Anthony Sutton is a business strategist and writer with a passion for management, leadership, and entrepreneurship. With years of experience in the corporate world, he shares insights on business growth, strategy, and innovation through management-opleiding.org.
