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Paul Spain: tech commentator on the economic impacts of the Amazon outage · Best of Business

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  Speaker 1: You're listening to a podcast from News Talk z B.
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  Speaker 1: Follow this and our wide range of podcasts now on
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  Speaker 1: iHeartRadio Now.
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  Speaker 2: This morning's Amazon Web services outage will have cost companies
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  Speaker 2: hundreds of billions of dollars. According to estimates, the outage
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  Speaker 2: affected thousands of companies, from Airlines to Zero, Alexa, Snapchat,
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  Speaker 2: the likes of TV and z in Sky and Yes, controversially,
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  Speaker 2: everyone's word all streak was broken if they're trying to
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  Speaker 2: do wordle in the evening. Paul Spain is the CEO
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  Speaker 2: of Guerrilla Technology.
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  Speaker 3: Hey Paul, Hi, Heather, did you lose your word all streak? No?
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  Speaker 4: Fortunately that that's not an addiction for me.
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  Speaker 1: Can they?
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  Speaker 2: Some people text me through the show, I lost my streak,
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  Speaker 2: but they've still got their streaks?
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  Speaker 1: Now?
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  Speaker 2: How is that because I played wordle while it was
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  Speaker 2: down and they didn't.
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  Speaker 4: It might be a timing thing depending on when you
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  Speaker 4: when you play and when they do. But I imagine if
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  Speaker 4: a lot of people are impacted, they can they can
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  Speaker 4: probably join join things up and of that for you.
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  Speaker 2: No, well, I hope So now listen. Is everything working now?
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  Speaker 2: Has it all been fixed?
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  Speaker 3: Yes?
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  Speaker 1: And no?
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  Speaker 4: So on the Amazon side, they're reporting that they're one
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  Speaker 4: hundred and however, many services that were offline or impacted
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  Speaker 4: are all back online. But a lot of things got
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  Speaker 4: broken in the process. And so when I looked at,
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  Speaker 4: for instance, Zero a few minutes ago, they were still
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  Speaker 4: reporting issues. And you know, I know people within my
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  Speaker 4: business have been impacted by that today and finding zero
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  Speaker 4: sort of you know, quite unreliable, slow and so on.
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  Speaker 4: So this is this is a thing when you when
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  Speaker 4: you when you break a lot of technology, sometimes it
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  Speaker 4: takes quite an effort to actually get that, you know,
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  Speaker 4: fully back to full operation. And possibly Amazon have been
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  Speaker 4: a bit cautious about putting things back up to full speed,
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  Speaker 4: but they haven't officially indicated that from from what I've seen.
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  Speaker 2: So given that there will be businesses who have, as
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  Speaker 2: I said earlier, lost a lot of money. Here who's
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  Speaker 2: libel is a w S liable.
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  Speaker 4: Usually they kind of contract themselves out of liability in
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  Speaker 4: their in their terms of service to it to at
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  Speaker 4: least a large degree. So I would be surprised if
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  Speaker 4: they're you know, heavily.
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  Speaker 3: You know, in trouble on this one, you know, directly.
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  Speaker 4: But I mean, yeah, that's that's not not something I've
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  Speaker 4: kind of have full knowledge on all the contracts that
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  Speaker 4: they've they've got maybe with some of their bigger, bigger customers.
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  Speaker 2: Now, look, there was one commentator today who suggested that
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  Speaker 2: what we need to do is diversify because we need
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  Speaker 2: to accept that this kind of thing is going to happen, right,
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  Speaker 2: and so maybe have your main bank account with one bank,
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  Speaker 2: but then have another bank account with a different bank,
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  Speaker 2: so that if your bank goes down in something like this,
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  Speaker 2: you still have access to money.
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  Speaker 3: What do you think might help? Might might not? Because
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  Speaker 3: as we move to a sort.
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  Speaker 4: Of world where the banks and everyone else is running
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  Speaker 4: off a small number of hyperscale cloud providers like a WS, Microsoft, Google,
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  Speaker 4: then you know, one thing being impacted can impact another.
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  Speaker 4: And of course you know banks rely on paymark and
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  Speaker 4: credit card platforms and so on, so you know it
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  Speaker 4: takes you know, one of those things to go down,
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  Speaker 4: could take all of our banks offline. And so just
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  Speaker 4: as you know, one of the arguments that you know
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  Speaker 4: some people will raise around you know, how much digitization
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  Speaker 4: should we have? Should we really keep going to a
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  Speaker 4: fully digitized sort of world where you don't have cash
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  Speaker 4: and so on? And you know this is one of
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  Speaker 4: those one of those things that that comes up, is
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  Speaker 4: it's nice to have some backup options.
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  Speaker 2: Is it also, though, necessary to worry about it so much,
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  Speaker 2: because don't we just have to accept this kind of
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  Speaker 2: thing is going to happen like it works ninety nine
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  Speaker 2: point seven percent of the time, sometimes it's not going
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  Speaker 2: to and it'll be up and running again within hours.
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  Speaker 4: Yes. No, I mean the big players, lie cameras on
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  Speaker 4: will put a lot of effort in behind the scenes
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  Speaker 4: to try and ensure that this particular issue never happens again.
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  Speaker 4: And you know, over the years they've continued to invest
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  Speaker 4: in resiliency. But you know what we've seen over the
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  Speaker 4: last twenty four hours is nobody gets it right all
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  Speaker 4: of the time. But the impact can be quite big.
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  Speaker 4: And you know, this one's saying, you know, we've we've
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  Speaker 4: heard these comments and you know, potentially hundreds of billions
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  Speaker 4: of dollars, but of course that's not evenly spread. So
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  Speaker 4: there may well be businesses in you know, multiple countries
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  Speaker 4: around the world that will shut down because this outage
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  Speaker 4: hit them, you know, in.
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  Speaker 3: The wrong way at the wrong time.
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  Speaker 4: And you know that that's that's not necessarily the sort
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  Speaker 4: of you know, the sort of outcome that you would want,
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  Speaker 4: and of course there is the potential for for you know,
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  Speaker 4: for bigger interruptions to the technology.
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  Speaker 1: Uh.
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  Speaker 4: You know, we saw Tonga when they went off offline
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  Speaker 4: you know pretty much as a uh you know, as
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  Speaker 4: a as a nation when their fiber optic cable to
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  Speaker 4: the rest of the world was was destroyed with with
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  Speaker 4: the volcano going back a little while. So you know,
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  Speaker 4: we do have to think around, well, how resilient are
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  Speaker 4: we and you know, is there such a thing as
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  Speaker 4: over digitization.
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  Speaker 2: That's a really interesting idea, Paul, Thank you very much.
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  Speaker 2: Paul Spain, CEO of Guerrilla Technology.
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