"It's Halloween and what better way to mark the day than discuss one of the biggest horror stories of October? We are of course referring to the AWS outage, which on 20 October took down some incredibly notable websites and caused global disruption. It's the latest, most severe example of why data centers are considered critical infrastructure - and acts as a stark reminder to IT administrators that even big tech can fall foul of technical errors."
"A lot of services were down. Some of the biggest websites, applications, platforms on the web, spanning the consumer and enterprise spaces, were were impacted by this. I mean, you guys know Slack was down for a period, so we were having to communicate over WhatsApp, but major banks, Lloyds, Halifax, their apps were down and Snapchat was down."
"...I've written about the launch of not one, not two, but eight supercomputers, or the announcement they're going to be created. So these are quite an eclectic mix of systems. Now, what I will say is that of all of these, of all of them, we have a solid date for one, which is Equinox. We only have that, and it's the first half of 2026."
A major AWS outage on 20 October disrupted high-profile consumer and enterprise services, including Slack, major banks' apps, and Snapchat. AWS engineers mitigated the error by late morning UK time, but many organizations faced lengthy recovery periods. The outage underlined the role of data centers as critical infrastructure and the vulnerability of even large cloud providers to technical failures. Separately, eight supercomputer projects were announced, with one confirmed system, Equinox, scheduled for the first half of 2026. HPE indicated deployment plans tied to Cray GX5000 systems during a pre-announcement press briefing.
Read at IT Pro
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