USA Today – March 1, 2017
By Elizabeth Weise
SAN FRANCISCO — It’s really not true that Amazon controls the Internet, though it can sometimes feel like it — especially after Tuesday’s four-hour Internet backend outage that slowed or stopped bits and pieces of tens of thousands of websites from loading.
To paraphrase the German statesman Klemens von Metternich, “when Amazon sneezes, the Internet catches a cold.”
The outage stemmed from a problem with Amazon’s popular cloud service Amazon Web Services that affected a big portion of its S3 system, one of AWS’ storage systems. That ended up being a big deal because Amazon has about 42% of the cloud market by revenue, according to the market research firm Forrester.
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Some groups called out Tuesday’s troubles as an example of the dangers of Amazon’s “monopolistic behavior in our economy,” in the words of the Washington D.C.-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Amazon controls too much of the web’s infrastructure, a report from that group said in December.
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