The butterfly that flapped: the Amazon crash

254 minutes: that’s how long the internet was thrown into chaos. Crashed websites and apps, broken links and images were all strewn across the globe because of one server. In this interconnected world we find ourselves in today, that’s all it takes…a delicate world indeed.

One butterfly, one server: the Amazon crash

A butterfly flaps its wings and a hurricane slams into a coast on the other side of the world…if a butterfly can do this, surely one of the largest servers in the Amazon Web Services roster can…and boy did the S3 server flap its wings. It sent multiple hurricanes to every corner of the world wide web.

While we weren’t directly affected, the S3 server hosts 1 percent of the world’s top 1 million sites and the world in which it inhabits is a web after all. Consequently, our publishers and advertisers whose websites and assets were hosted on S3 were. Below is a brief overview of how the Amazon crash affected Adcash.

• Publisher websites went down, resulting in supply disruption
• Advertiser landing pages went down, resulting in campaign disruption
• 3rd-party tracking services went down, resulting in reporting disruption

In short, a lot of things went down. But today’s a new day: the S3 section of the web is repaired and everything in the world wide web is right again. Thank you for hanging tough and keeping a cool head, now let’s get back to what we’re here for: making money. Until the next crash…