Amazon says underlying problems fixed, now the blame game beginspublished at 19:23 BST 20 October
Lily Jamali
North America technology correspondent
Amazon Web Services says the underlying problems that caused
today’s outage are fixed. Now the blame game has begun.
One computer science expert says some of the responsibility
rests with the companies who use AWS.
“Companies using Amazon haven’t been taking enough adequate
care to build protection systems into their applications,” says Ken Birman, a
computer science professor at Cornell University in New York.
Outages like the one on Monday occur all the time, although
not always at this scale.
Birman tells the BBC that app developers should take care to
invest in backing up mission-critical applications that live in the cloud.
“We know how to make these systems stronger, and we know how
to do it securely,” Birman says.
The question of responsibility could well land in the
courts.
More than a year after the massive CrowdStrike outage, Delta
Airlines is still wrangling with the company to recover more than $500m in
losses.
Even after CrowdStrike had fixed the issue, the airline said
it had to manually reset 40,000 servers, leading to major flight delays over
several days.
Given how integrated these systems are, determining fault
isn’t always straightforward.
