AWS outage brings down half the internet for hours. Here's what happened

A massive outage in Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday brought down some of the world's most popular websites and apps for several hours, disrupting global businesses and everyday online life. The widespread failure, traced to a technical fault in AWS's core network, highlighted how much of the internet is dependent on the operations of a single company.

Social media and messaging apps such as Snapchat, WhatsApp, Signal, and Reddit went down for hours, leaving millions of users unable to send messages or access content.

Core financial and trading platforms, including Coinbase, Robinhood, Venmo, and several UK banking sites like Lloyds Bank and Bank of Scotland, also faced interruptions.

Even Amazon's own services - including its main shopping website, Alexa smart devices, Prime Video, and Ring doorbell cameras - were affected.

Here are ten key points explaining what happened causing one of the biggest internet disruptions in recent years:

Amazon's cloud computing arm, AWS, experienced a global outage on Monday that took down thousands of websites and services across multiple continents. The disruption affected sectors from finance and media to gaming and education, marking one of the largest internet breakdowns since last year's CrowdStrike incident.

The issue began early Monday (US time) in AWS's US-EAST-1 region in northern Virginia - its oldest and most critical data hub. Amazon initially reported “significant error rates and latencies” before identifying the cause as a Domain Name System (DNS) malfunction, which prevented apps and websites from reaching their servers.

AWS provides behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure to some of the world's biggest organisations. Its customers include government departments, universities and businesses.

The outage hit a vast range of platforms including Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo, Coinbase, Robinhood, Venmo, Signal, WhatsApp, Airbnb, Disney+, Prime Video, Alexa, and Amazon.com itself.

In the UK, Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland, Vodafone, BT, HMRC, and several government websites also went offline, while smart devices like Ring doorbells and Kindle services were disrupted.

Check full list of sites and apps that were impacted by AWS outage here

Outage tracker Downdetector received over 11 million user reports of AWS issues, while Ookla said more than 4 million individual users faced disruptions.

The widespread downtime affected thousands of companies relying on AWS for cloud hosting and storage.

Also read: Was AI behind AWS outage? Social media wonders as world faces massive disruption

AWS later confirmed that the outage stemmed from a failure in its DNS system and a malfunction in a network health monitoring subsystem that impacted the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Network Load Balancer.

These systems are critical for directing internet traffic efficiently across servers.

Also read: What is DNS and how is the internet system linked to the AWS outage

Amazon's engineers began mitigation efforts soon after identifying the problem around 0711 GMT, throttling operations to stabilize the network. By 1030 GMT, AWS said the DNS fault had been “fully mitigated,” though clearing the resulting data backlog took several more hours.

By evening, the company declared that “all AWS services have returned to normal operations,” with minor residual delays in some internal systems like AWS Config and Redshift.

Experts likened the recovery process to restoring electricity after a major blackout - systems must come online gradually to avoid further strain.

AWS advised customers to clear DNS caches to restore full connectivity, and some apps continued experiencing minor lags into Tuesday.

This was at least the third major AWS outage linked to the US-EAST-1 region since 2020. The data center is the default region for many AWS services, making it a critical and vulnerable point in the global digital infrastructure.

Cybersecurity and technology experts warned that the outage highlights how fragile and centralized the internet has become.

“The world now runs on the cloud,” said Patrick Burgess of the UK's Chartered Institute for IT. “When a major provider like AWS goes down, the ripple effects are immediate and widespread.”

Analysts compared the situation to “putting all economic eggs in one basket,” given that just three providers - AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud - handle most of the world's online infrastructure.

Although Amazon confirmed no data loss or cyberattack, experts estimate the downtime could cost hundreds of billions of dollars globally in lost productivity and transactions.

The tech giant said it will release a detailed postmortem report soon.

The outage serves as a stark reminder of the world's dependence on a small number of cloud giants and the cascading risks when one of them falters.

Source: HindustanTimes
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