Amazon Staff Insist No Technical Glitches on INEC Server on Election Day

President Bola Tinubu and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), yesterday, interrogated a Cloud engineer and architect at Amazon Web Services Incorporated (AWS), Clareta Ogar, who insisted  that a report of the health status of the Amazon Web Services which hosts INEC IReV portal showed there were no technical glitches on 25 February.

INEC had, in a statement issued a day after the polls by its Commissioner for Voter Education, Festus Okoye, blamed unexpected technical for the commission’s inability to ensure real-time uploading of results to IReV portal as provided in the guidelines for the election.

Voting ended in most of the over 176,000 polling units where the election held across Nigeria on 25 February, but results remained inaccessible on the INEC IReV portal 24 hours after polling ended.

In their joint petition, Obi and Labour Party cited the failure to upload the results of the election to IReV as one the breaches that marred the disputed poll.

The petitioners also alleged that INEC manipulated the polls in favour of Mr Tinubu and APC.

Under cross-exammination by counsel to INEC, Tinubu and APC, Clarita who returned to the witness box refused to shift grounds on her testimony as the Petitioners Prosecution Witness (PW7).

She was subjected to a barrage of questions by counsel to the respondents that got the proceedings heated up at some point.

Both counsel to INEC, Abubakar Mahmoud and that of Tinubu Wole Olanipekun in their separate cross-examination tried to establish what her link with the organization she claimed she works for is.

They made reference to her appointment verification letter which bears the name Employee Resource Centre and not Amazon Web Services, AWS, Inc; and also that there was no identification card from the company confirming her as an employee.

At a point, a senior counsel in the petitioners legal team, Patrick Ikwueto, was not spared by the court in his several attempts to interrupt the cross-examination.

He was accused by the court of trying to waste the time of the cross examiners.

For instance, Ikwueto’s insistence that the witness has answered a question put to her bordering on her employment letter and staff status led to a reprimand by the Justices who cautioned him for disrupting proceedings.

Chairman of the five-member panel, Justice Haruna Tsammani told Ikwueto: “You are going about this as if you are in parliament. You are a senior counsel, Ikwueto, there are juniors behind you” while the next most senior member on the panel, Justice Stephen Adah admonished: “Please, don’t interject if you don’t want us to take meaner action against you.”

The subpoenaed witness responding to question as to why she did not tender her identification card, told the court that AWS does not issue identification cards, and all employment verifications from Amazon Web Services are issued by Employee Resource Centre of the company.

She equally  denied being in court as a representative of the company she works for and on the mandate of Amazon Web Services, but as an expert subpoenaed witness to speak as a cloud engineer.

This led to further questioning on how she got the report she submitted before the court, and she responded that they are public information posted on the AWS Amazon.

Asked whether the report she submitted was a product of Amazon, she claimed ownership of it on the ground that she was the one that submitted it before the court.

Pressed on her political affiliation, she confirmed that she is a member of the Labour Party and she contested for a House of Reps election in her constituency in Cross River State but lost.

She, however, denied any allusions that she is a Labour Party activist

On further questioning, the witness confirmed that she had sued INEC after it failed to publish her name in the final list of candidates; and that her main complaint was that she could not upload her information on the INEC website due to network failure. She, however, refused to accept that network failure is a form of network glitch.

The respondents’ counsel also read out information showing periods in which the Amazon cloud services suffered glitches globally on February 27, 2017. While the witness confirmed that the glitch actually occurred, she held on to the position that the health status report as at the day of the presidential election on February 25 showed there was no glitch on the infrastructure that hosted applications and accounts including that of INEC.