Free Republic

Amazon’s cloud business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), experienced issues Wednesday, taking multiple internet services offline. AWS posted a notice on its service health dashboard early Wednesday saying it was “investigating increased EC2 launch failures and networking connectivity issues for some instances in a single Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) in the US-EAST-1 Region,” The Verge reported. The incident reportedly affected “a single data center within a single Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) in the US-EAST-1 Region.” The incident resulted in widespread outages for various online services and applications across the world. Internet services outages are currently impacting the Epic Games Store, affecting logins, library,...

The outage at Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud-computing arm left thousands of people in the U.S. without working fridges, roombas and doorbells, highlighting just how reliant people have become on the company as the Internet of Things proliferates across homes. Multiple Ring users even said they weren’t able to get into their homes without access to the phone app, which was down. The outage prompted people to reflect on the pitfalls of having a “smart” home that’s overly dependent on not only the internet, but one company in particular -- while those with “dumb” homes gloated that their fridges and light switches...

The first to call the presidential election for Joe Biden was AT&T. AT&T, through its subsidiary CNN, one of the largest conglomerates in the world with a market cap of over $200 billion, billions of which come from lucrative federal contracts, was the first to claim that Biden was the winner. Beyond government contracts, AT&T has a major stake in the 5G wars and has spent a lot of money investing in the Biden campaign. AT&T employees were the tenth largest source of contributions to the Biden campaign. Biden had attended fundraisers at the homes of two AT&T lobbyists, but...

For the first time, the Defense Department will begin moving classified data and applications to Amazon Web Services’ Secret Region—the same cloud environment developed for the CIA and intelligence community several years ago. The Defense Department’s sole-source decision—a contract awarded without a full and open competition—was protested by Microsoft, which itself offers a variety of cloud services to the federal government.

Sensitive personal details relating to almost 200 million US citizens have been accidentally exposed by a marketing firm contracted by the Republican National Committee. The 1.1 terabytes of data includes birthdates, home addresses, telephone numbers and political views of nearly 62% of the entire US population. The data was available on a publicly accessible Amazon cloud server. Anyone could access the data as long as they had a link to it.

Sensitive personal details relating to almost 200 million US citizens have been accidentally exposed by a marketing firm contracted by the Republican National Committee. The 1.1 terabytes of data includes birthdates, home addresses, telephone numbers and political views of nearly 62% of the entire US population. The data was available on a publicly accessible Amazon cloud server. Anyone could access the data as long as they had a link to it.

Curious why there are those with an online business, who believe that handing over their entire back office infrastructure to one company, aka "going cloud" may not be the wisest of ideas. Just ask all those websites that use Amazon's cloud service today, who suddenly went dark when the Amazon cloud crashed. From the NYT: Amazon’s data centers in Northern Virginia crashed Monday afternoon, taking with it a number of popular Web sites, from Someecards, the quirky e-card company, to mobile applications like Flipboard and Foursquare. Amazon reported having problems with the data centers in Northern Virginia. Those problems appear...