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 (00:00):
Now, 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. Hey Paul, Hi, Heather, did did you

(00:22):
lose your word all streak?

Speaker 2 (00:24):
No? Fortunately, that that's not an addiction for me, can they?

Speaker 1 (00:31):
Some people text me through the show, I lost my streak,
but they've still got their streaks?

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Now?

Speaker 1 (00:36):
Is that because I played wordle while it was down
and they didn't.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
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 solve that for you.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
No, well, I hope, so now listen. Is everything working now?
Has it all been fixed?

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Yes? And no? 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,

(01:18):
they were still 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,

(01:40):
you know, 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 1 (01:54):
So given that there will be businesses who have, as
I said earlier, lost a lot of money here, who's liable?
Is it is liable?

Speaker 2 (02:02):
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 you know, in trouble on this one,
you know directly. But I mean, yeah, that's that's not

(02:27):
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 1 (02:35):
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 2 (02:52):
What do you think might help? Might might not? Because
as we move to a sort of world where the
banks and everyone else is running off a small number
of hyperscale cloud providers like a WS Microsoft, you know, Google,

(03:12):
then you know one thing being impacted can impact another.
And of course you know banks rely on paymark and
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

(03:35):
some people will raise around you know, how much digitization
should we have? Should we really keep going to a
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
that it's nice to have some backup options, is it also.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
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 2 (04:07):
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

(04:29):
of the time, but the impact can 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 and you know, multiple countries
around the world that will shut down because this outage

(04:50):
hit them, you know, in the wrong way at the
wrong time. 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. Uh.
You know, we saw Tonga when they they went off offline,

(05:14):
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
we and you know, is there such a thing as
over digitization.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
That's a really interesting idea, Paul, Thank you very much.
Paul Spain, CEO of Guerrilla Technology.

Speaker 2 (05:40):
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