Paul Spain: tech commentator on the economic impacts of the Amazon outage

Problems with Amazon's cloud services in the US have been felt around the world.

Thousands of websites and apps were affected by an outage during the night, including TVNZ Plus, Neon, Sky TV, Snapchat and Wordle.

Tech commentator Paul Spain says a lot of things got broken in the process of trying to undo the damage, and some businesses are still trying to recover.

"When you break a lot of technology, sometimes it takes quite a bit of effort to actually get that fully back to operation, and possibly Amazon have been a bit cautious about putting thing back up to full speed, but they haven't officially indicated that from what I've seen." 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
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Speaker 2 (00:16):
This morning's Amazon Web services outage will have cost companies
hundreds of billions of dollars. According to estimates, the outage
affected thousands of companies, from Airlines to Zero, Alexa, Snapchat,
the likes of TV and z in Sky and Yes, controversially,
everyone's word all streak was broken if they're trying to
do wordle in the evening. Paul Spain is the CEO
of Guerrilla Technology.

Speaker 3 (00:36):
Hey Paul, Hi, Heather, did you lose your word all streak? No?

Speaker 4 (00:42):
Fortunately that that's not an addiction for me.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
Can they?

Speaker 2 (00:48):
Some people text me through the show, I lost my streak,
but they've still got their streaks?

Speaker 1 (00:52):
Now?

Speaker 2 (00:53):
How is that because I played wordle while it was
down and they didn't.

Speaker 4 (00:57):
It might be a timing thing depending on when you
when you play and when they do. But I imagine if
a lot of people are impacted, they can they can
probably join join things up and of that for you.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
No, well, I hope So now listen. Is everything working now?
Has it all been fixed?

Speaker 3 (01:14):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (01:14):
And no?

Speaker 4 (01:14):
So on the Amazon side, they're reporting that they're one
hundred and however, many services that were offline or impacted
are all back online. But a lot of things got
broken in the process. And so when I looked at,
for instance, Zero a few minutes ago, they were still

(01:35):
reporting issues. And you know, I know people within my
business have been impacted by that today and finding zero
sort of you know, quite unreliable, slow and so on.
So this is this is a thing when you when
you when you break a lot of technology, sometimes it
takes quite an effort to actually get that, you know,

(01:57):
fully back to full operation. And possibly Amazon have been
a bit cautious about putting things back up to full speed,
but they haven't officially indicated that from from what I've seen.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
So given that there will be businesses who have, as
I said earlier, lost a lot of money. Here who's
libel is a w S liable.

Speaker 4 (02:19):
Usually they kind of contract themselves out of liability in
their in their terms of service to it to at
least a large degree. So I would be surprised if
they're you know, heavily.

Speaker 3 (02:36):
You know, in trouble on this one, you know, directly.

Speaker 4 (02:41):
But I mean, yeah, that's that's not not something I've
kind of have full knowledge on all the contracts that
they've they've got maybe with some of their bigger, bigger customers.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
Now, look, there was one commentator today who suggested that
what we need to do is diversify because we need
to accept that this kind of thing is going to happen, right,
and so maybe have your main bank account with one bank,
but then have another bank account with a different bank,
so that if your bank goes down in something like this,
you still have access to money.

Speaker 3 (03:08):
What do you think might help? Might might not? Because
as we move to a sort.

Speaker 4 (03:15):
Of world where the banks and everyone else is running
off a small number of hyperscale cloud providers like a WS, Microsoft, Google,
then you know, one thing being impacted can impact another.
And of course you know banks rely on paymark and

(03:37):
credit card platforms and so on, so you know it
takes you know, one of those things to go down,
could take all of our banks offline. And so just
as you know, one of the arguments that you know
some people will raise around you know, how much digitization
should we have? Should we really keep going to a

(04:00):
fully digitized sort of world where you don't have cash
and so on? And you know this is one of
those one of those things that that comes up, is
it's nice to have some backup options.

Speaker 2 (04:11):
Is it also, though, necessary to worry about it so much,
because don't we just have to accept this kind of
thing is going to happen like it works ninety nine
point seven percent of the time, sometimes it's not going
to and it'll be up and running again within hours.

Speaker 4 (04:24):
Yes. No, I mean the big players, lie cameras on
will put a lot of effort in behind the scenes
to try and ensure that this particular issue never happens again.
And you know, over the years they've continued to invest
in resiliency. But you know what we've seen over the
last twenty four hours is nobody gets it right all

(04:45):
of the time. But the impact can be quite big.
And you know, this one's saying, you know, we've we've
heard these comments and you know, potentially hundreds of billions
of dollars, but of course that's not evenly spread. So
there may well be businesses in you know, multiple countries
around the world that will shut down because this outage

(05:07):
hit them, you know, in.

Speaker 3 (05:09):
The wrong way at the wrong time.

Speaker 4 (05:12):
And you know that that's that's not necessarily the sort
of you know, the sort of outcome that you would want,
and of course there is the potential for for you know,
for bigger interruptions to the technology.

Speaker 1 (05:26):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (05:27):
You know, we saw Tonga when they went off offline
you know pretty much as a uh you know, as
a as a nation when their fiber optic cable to
the rest of the world was was destroyed with with
the volcano going back a little while. So you know,
we do have to think around, well, how resilient are

(05:47):
we and you know, is there such a thing as
over digitization.

Speaker 2 (05:52):
That's a really interesting idea, Paul, Thank you very much.
Paul Spain, CEO of Guerrilla Technology.

Speaker 1 (05:57):
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