Most large and small businesses and governments have moved their operations to cloud services due to the cost benefit. You then are at the mercy of their ability to keep their operations functional.
The following was shared with me earlier today:
“Twitter lit up today with the latest AWS has been mostly silent only saying it is, "investigating Internet connectivity issues to the US-WEST-1 Region." Meanwhile,Downdetector was showing a growing billboard of impacted sites all morning, including:
“Doordash, Amazon Web Services, Playstation Network, Twitch, Quickbooks Online, Duo, Hulu, Amazon, Crunchyroll, League of Legends, Apex Legends, Halo, Clash Royale, SiriusXM, Xbox Live, Wyze, Google, Zoom, Valorant, Facebook, Salesforce, Okta, Canvas by Instructure, Microsoft Azure, Cloudflare, Siri, Microsoft, Blizzard Battle.net, Alexa, Uber Eats, Outlook, Shopify, Office 365, Wave Broadband, UPS, Grubhub, IMVU, Spectrum, Verizon, Cox, Funimation, Minecraft, AT&T, Call of Duty, Xfinity, EA, T-Mobile & Starbucks.
“Experts with Gurucul, Shared Assessments and YouAttest provide comments:
“Saryu Nayyar, CEO, Gurucul (she/her):
“‘For the second time in as many weeks, sites and applications using Amazon AWS have suffered a massive outage. Last week it was the East Coast servers, today the West Coast. This has affected many sites, including Twitch (reportedly back up), Quickbooks, and Xbox.
“‘The root cause of both of these outages isn’t yet clear, but if it is a concerted attack, it was designed to do massive damage to the Internet infrastructure. Amazon has to be the one to remediate, but enterprises should also have backup DNS routes into on-premises copies of their software. If so, failover should be relatively straightforward. While it can be expensive to maintain backup systems, anyone that relies on Internet traffic as mission critical should look at having just such a backup.’
“Nasser Fattah, North America Steering Committee Chair, Shared Assessments:
“‘Cloud outages are not new, and will happen in the future. And unfortunately, when it happens, it can disrupt a broad regional area, for example, the northeast. Thus, it is important for businesses to expect and plan for unplanned outages with their cloud providers. The same is true for businesses to know which of their critical third-parties rely on cloud providers and that these third-parties have plans in place for cloud outages. Both scenarios need to be part of an organization's overall operational resilience program so that business dependent technologies, for example, the cloud, are architected to withstand unplanned outages.’
“Garret Grajek, CEO, YouAttest:
“‘Once again an attack is being hurled at our major cites - attacking the Availability in the security ‘CIA’ triad: Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. The hackers know that kicking any leg in this security tripod will cause a failure in the system. To mitigate enterprises must have the tools and recovery mechanism to respond to each of these attacks. Unfortunately, in the case of availability attackers often attack mechanisms such as service providers and the global DNS system to affect the availability of the site. It is yet to be seen what this attack is - but be safe to say it’s part of a bigger attempt to breach our systems and obtain assets from the enterprises.’”
