RICHMOND, Va. β A widespread outage related to a problem at an Amazon Web Services data center in Northern Virginia forced some Richmond businesses to adapt quickly, while VCU students faced disrupted classes and services.
At The Toast New American Gastro Pub in Richmond's Scott's Addition, owner Chris Staples said employees returned to old-fashioned methods while the software they use to operate their restaurant, Toast POS, was down.
"I think it's good for us in certain ways to flex those muscles that haven't been flexed for a while," Staples said.
Staff took orders by hand and wrote tickets for the kitchen, but the restaurant software failure created problems that weren't as easy to work around.
"It affected scheduling, it affected reservations, it affected waitlists, it affected third party integration and any sort of ability to receive information electronically and send it out, just completely failed," Staples said.
Across town at VCU, students also felt the ripple effects of the outage. Senior Rishi Kant Mishra said his classes rely heavily on Canvas, the university's learning management system.
"All of my classes use Canvas, so we had a quiz planned in my virology class and he just had to move it all the way to Friday," Mishra said.
The impact was widespread because much of the world relies on three or four big cloud computing companies like AWS. The outage affected the travel industry, government institutions and private businesses.
Even Amazon's own services like Ring doorbell cameras and Alexa weren't immune to the disruption.
"I looked on Amazon Prime to get something delivered but I was not able to do that either," Mishra said.
VCU student Ohene Kumi said even Grubhub was down, making online food ordering impossible.
"It's kind of interesting to see how much stuff goes down when one thing goes bad," Kumi said.
Staples said the restaurant's software was slowly coming back online by 7 p.m., but by then, significant business was lost.
"You know, that hurt us today," Staples said.
Christopher Whyte, an associate professor of homeland security at VCU, said Amazon Web Services, along with Google and Microsoft, provide critical cloud services for the entire country. He said it's one reason why states like Virginia should focus on decentralization of services to avoid these widespread problems.
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