Why AWS outage has put Northern Virginia data centres in spotlight

Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a massive outage on Monday, causing disruptions around the world and leading to outages across several websites and services, including Amazon Prime, Perplexity, Alexa, Snapchat, Canva and Reddit.

AWS, the world's largest cloud provider, said it identified the potential root cause behind the error rates, adding that the issue is now “fully mitigated”.

“We confirm that we have now recovered processing of SQS queues via Lambda Event Source Mappings. We are now working through processing the backlog of SQS messages in Lambda queues” Amazon said in its latest update on the AWS health dashboard.

The disruption, which began around 12 pm (IST), not just affected global users and those in the US, but also several thousand Indian users submitted outage reports while using platforms like Snapchat, Canva and Slack.

AWS said that the error was found to originate in a critical AWS infrastructure zone, the US-East-1 region, located in the northern part of the US state of Virginia. It said that the source was traced to DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region.

"Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1. We are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery. This issue also affects other AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region," the company said in its earlier statement.

The region is based in Northern Virginia, which has become a hub for data centres. Northern Virginia is said to be the largest cluster of data centres for Amazon globally.

The maintenance site for Amazon Web Services said it took some three hours for engineers to largely fix the problem, which they first noticed when "increased error rates" hit multiple services.

Amazon's cloud service is the one of the most popular cloud provider globally, dominating a large chunk of the internet. According to a report in Bloomberg, Amazon accounts for around one-third of the cloud market.

However, being the leader in the cloud computing service, Amazon isn't immune to technical glitches. In 2023, several AWS' internet services were down after a brief outage. The longest outage was recorded in 2021, when companies -- everything from airline reservations and auto dealerships to payment apps and video streaming services -- were affected for more than five hours. There were other disruptions in 2020 and 2017 too.

Source: Hindustan Times
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