US EditionAmazon’s DNS Problem Knocked Out Half the Web, Likely Costing Billions
A DNS failure in AWS's US-EAST-1 region caused global disruptions affecting supermarkets, hospitals, airlines, and over 140 government agencies, highlighting risks in centralized cloud infrastructure.
- On Monday, Amazon Web Services experienced an outage that disrupted major internet services, causing supermarkets to shut down, emergency services to go dark, and airlines to ground thousands of flights.
- Root causes point to a DNS failure within Amazon Web Services' US-EAST-1 region, Virginia, USA; more than 140 Commonwealth, state and territory agencies rely on AWS under the federal government three-year whole-of-government deal .
- Historical incidents show similar disruption but different technical causes: 2023 and 2021 AWS outages blocked airline reservations for five hours, while the CrowdStrike July 19, 2024 incident affected individual machines one by one.
- Officials call for mandated redundancy and clearer public disclosures as governments and regulators must treat cloud infrastructure like a critical public utility, citing AWS's inadequate overnight updates.
- The outage highlights risks from centralising internet services as Monday's event, following last year's CrowdStrike disaster, urges debate on systemic fragility in digital infrastructure.
17 Articles
17 Articles
Good morning! Did it feel like half the internet was down on Monday? When Amazon Web Services has problems, almost everyone else does too.
Half of the internet was down on Monday. Here’s why
AWS outage: On Monday (October 20), sites such as Snapchat, Fortnite, Amazon, Canva, and even airlines such as Delta and United Airlines faced disruptions after Amazon’s computing services, Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a global outage. Hours after the glitch was first reported, Amazon fixed the issue, with online services back on track. They attributed the trouble to an error with its Domain Name System (DNS) in Virginia
Sydney Morning Herald
Why one company’s glitch just broke half the internet
The outage impacted millions of users globally, including in Australia, knocking over everything from Snapchat to banking apps, from Fortnite to Tinder, from Ring doorbells to cryptocurrency exchanges. Amazon’s own website and its voice assistant Alexa were crippled. It’s time we stopped accepting that as normal.
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