Amazon has confirmed that its cloud service is back up and running normally after a significant internet outage caused havoc for thousands of sites worldwide. It’s being called the largest disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike incident, which famously brought tech systems in hospitals, banks, and airports to a standstill. It’s a stark reminder of just how fragile our interconnected digital world can be.
According to Reuters, the trouble was centred on Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) northern Virginia data cluster, known as US-EAST-1. The culprit? An issue with the Domain Name System, or DNS. Essentially, this is the internet’s address book, and the glitch stopped applications from finding the correct address for AWS’s DynamoDB API. That’s a critical cloud database that countless services rely on to store user information and other vital data.
As the world’s largest cloud provider, AWS is the behind-the-scenes engine for computing power and data storage for a huge range of companies, governments, and even individuals. According to AWS, the root cause was an underlying subsystem that monitors the health of its network load balancers – the bits that cleverly distribute traffic across multiple servers to keep everything running smoothly.
The incident has sparked some commentary from experts. Jake Moore, a global cybersecurity advisor at ESET, noted that this outage “once again highlights the dependency we have on relatively fragile infrastructures.” Meanwhile, Nishanth Sastry, director of research at the University of Surrey’s Department of Computer Science, pointed out that “the main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one service.”
The scale of the disruption was substantial. Ookla, the company that owns Downdetector, reported that over 4 million users logged issues due to the incident, with at least a thousand companies feeling the effects. It just goes to show how a single knot in one part of the web can unravel things for everyone.