It might have been difficult to access some of your favorite websites yesterday after a major outage hit Amazon.com Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) web services division.
Users and websites impacted by the outage say it started just before 1:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time and continued for about four hours. It was localized to a number of servers located in Virginia.
Websites impacted by the outage included Slack, Trello, and Medium, as well as many lesser known destinations. Many users of Amazon’s cloud-based storage reported problems as well. Ironically, Amazon.com itself was not affected.
Amazon has quietly become the web’s hosting provider of choice, with revenues growing at a 50% annual rate over the past few years. Analysts project Amazon Web Services (AWS) will do $13 billion in revenue in 2017, or a little under 10% of the company’s total top line.
While that pales in comparison to Amazon’s main business, AWS is much more profitable than retail. In 2016, AWS did $12.2 billion in revenue. It delivered $3 billion in profits. Or to put it another way, in the most recent quarter AWS accounted for 71% of Amazon’s total operating profits.
Needless to say, web services are an important part of Amazon’s business.
Amazon shares shrugged off the news, falling only marginally during Tuesday’s trading Shares rallied on Wednesday along with the rest of the market, rising to within 1% of a 52-week high. It’s obvious investors categorized the outage as a non-event.
