Infra breakdown: AWS' global outage creates a moment of vulnerability

AWS suffers major global outage on October 20, affecting millions of users and services including Canva, Duolingo, and Snapchat amid its dominant cloud market presence

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday experienced a major global outage that disrupted several of its widely used applications and services, including Canva, Duolingo, and Snapchat. 

Data by DownDetector, an online platform to provide real-time information and detect problems in various websites and services, showed over 9,000 outages  reported worldwide by 10.30 PM IST on October 20. Of these, 3.2 per cent of the outage reports came from India alone. 

This incident is particularly noteworthy given AWS’ dominant position in the cloud services market. In 2023, under the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model, which provides core infrastructure such as servers and storage for full control over the computing resources, AWS commanded a dominant 47 per cent global market share and an even higher 60 per cent share in India. Microsoft came behind AWS both in India and the world. 

For Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud service delivery, which provides a ready-to-use platform with tools for building, testing, and deploying applications, Microsoft led with an 18 per cent global share with a share of 24 per cent in India, with AWS trailing Microsoft. 

For Software as a Service (SaaS), which offers complete software solutions with online accessibility and no physical set-up requirement, Microsoft and Salesforce were the market leaders both in India and globally.AWS contributed over 58 per cent of Amazon’s operating income in the year ended December 31, 2024. Its share in Amazon’s net sales was 16.86 per cent during the same period – the highest in recent years. 

Further, the AWS employs H-1B visa holders too. In the first three quarters of the US fiscal year, 2025 (Oct-Sept), AWS came at the 11th position, hiring 2,347 H-1B visa holders.  The number of such hirings by AWS has increased after the pandemic, with the company employing 3,078 H-1B visa holders in fiscal year 2022.