PRESIDENT Bola Tinubu, through his legal team, told the Presidential Election Petition Court in Abuja that Amazon Web Services (AWS) server is prone to glitches, contrary to the claims of the firm’s cloud and web engineer that there was not reported problem with its server on the February 25, 2023 day of the presidential election.
AWS Incorporated hosts the Results Viewing (IReV) portal of the Independent national Electoral Commission (INEC), which was deployed in the conduct of disputed elections.
AWS is a subsidiary of Amazon, an online store for assorted commodities with global patronage and provides on-demand cloud computing platforms to individuals, companies and government agencies.
The presidential candidates of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, and and his Labour Party (LP) counterpart, Peter Obi, are challenging the declaration of Tinubu as the elected president from the election, accusing INEC of manipulating the results in favour of Tinubu and his All Progressives Congress (APC).
INEC’s failure to upload the results in real-time, as promised, because of technical glitches suffered by the IReV portal as a result of network failure, is a major reasons opposition parties and their supporters criticised the outcome of the presidential election.
A web engineer from AWS, Mpeh Ogar, brought by Obi to testify in court on Monday, June 19, while dismissing INEC’s claim, insisted that the IReV portal did not experience any technical hitches to justify INEC’s failure to upload real-time the polling unit results of the 25 February presidential election.
Tinubu’s Counsel, Wole Olanipekun (SAN), while cross-examining Ogar, asked the witness if she was aware that “In 2021, AWS experienced 27 outages on its servers,” to which she responded “no.”
Olanipekun made a reference a glitch experienced by MTN Momo-PSB (Payment Service Bank), fintech subsidiary of MTN Nigeria, which caused erroneous transfers of the bank’s customers’ funds, but Ogar, a cloud engineer and architect at Amazon Web Services Incorporated, said: “It is highly unusual for glitches to occur for primary functions during production of AWS when it is available to end-users.”
She told the court that her reports of the 33 regions where Amazon Web Services hosts their servers “are available public information,” clarifying that she was not at the court to testify as Amazon Web Services Incorporated official, but to “testify as an expert witness” regarding the technology that hosts INEC IReV.
She said she was an LP candidate for the House of Representatives election in Cross River State, which she lost, but added, while being cross-examined by APC’s Counsel, Lateef Fagbemi, “nothing is impossible,” regarding glitches during the deployment of AWS technology.
She earlier told the court that “glitches only happen during the testing stage of the (AWS) software.”
The court later adjourned until Wednesday, June 21 for further hearing.
Obi is expected to close his case on Friday, June 23, to be followed by Tinubu, INEC and the APC defence.
