FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) — Valley residents woke up in the midst of a global tech outage on Monday.
“I feel angry”, Rebeca Gonzalez told Action News. She went hours without the GPS on her phone after losing cell service in the middle of her drive to Fresno.
Some Fresno residents also complained of delays going to work after gas stations and coffee shops experienced trouble processing credit cards in the middle of the morning rush hour.
The outage with Amazon Web Services brought several systems to a grinding halt. Down Detector tracked issues across the web from Microsoft 365 to social media, and even Google.
“It certainly shows you how interconnected everything is and how reliant we are, sort of, on your back-end shared providers in some way,” UC Merced Professor Lisa Yeo told Action News.
She explained that the issue impacted the “core” of the internet, comparing it to the highway in the cloud that connects traffic.
“They essentially had an outage in the domain name services, which is – think of it as like the telephone book, like the White Pages for internet sites (that) translates from the name to an address for the machine,” Yeo said.
Verizon was one of the hardest hit by the outage. Gonzalez was one of the customers who lined up at local stores, thinking it was their phone.
“They said, ‘Oh, it’s happened to everybody.’ That’s it,” Gonzalez said of her conversation with a store representative.
Elsewhere in the Valley, students struggled to complete online coursework. The State Center Community College District and Fresno State posted messages to inform students that the online learning platform, Canvas, was also down.
“Big companies are being reliant on these web services and especially because there’s a select number of them that work,” Yeo said.
With Amazon Web Services now back online, there is a rush to get things restarted.
“Even once they get the system running again, we’re still seeing that it’s out,” Yeo said.
She believes the outage should prompt conversations about how we treat critical infrastructure, like the internet, suggesting a mix of industry partnerships, government regulation and policy.
