What the Huge AWS Outage Reveals About the Internet
A huge cloud An outage originating from Amazon Web Services’ key US-EAST-1 region, its hub near the US capital in northern Virginia, caused widespread disruptions to websites and platforms around the world on Monday morning. Amazon’s main e-commerce platform and other properties, including Ring doorbells and smart assistant Alexa, suffered interruptions and outages throughout the morning, as did Meta’s WhatsApp communications platform, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, PayPal’s Venmo payment platform, several Epic Games web services, several UK government sites and more.
The outages originated with Amazon’s “DynamoDB” database application programming interfaces in US-EAST-1, and AWS said in status updates that the issue was specifically related to DNS resolution issues. The “domain name system” is a fundamental Internet service that essentially acts as an automatic phone book lookup to translate web URLs such as “www.wired.com” into numeric server IP addresses so that web browsers show users the correct content. DNS “resolution” problems arise when DNS servers do not connect these dots precisely and, to stick with the phone book analogy, provide incorrect numbers for a given name, or vice versa.
“Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1,” AWS wrote in status updates Monday. Shortly after, the company added: “If you are still having an issue resolving DynamoDB service endpoints in US-EAST-1, we recommend flushing your DNS caches. »
An AWS spokesperson did not immediately respond when asked for details about the nature of the failure. DNS resolution issues can be malicious (called DNS hijacking), but there is no indication that Monday’s AWS outages were harmful.
“When the system failed to correctly determine which server to connect to, cascading outages disrupted services across the Internet,” says Davi Ottenheimer, longtime head of security operations and compliance and vice president at data infrastructure company Inrupt. “The current AWS outage is a classic availability issue, and we need to start thinking of it more as a data integrity failure. »
The problems started around 3 a.m. ET. As of 5:22 a.m. ET, AWS had applied “initial mitigation measures” that were beginning to take effect. As of 6:35 a.m. ET, Amazon said it had fully resolved the underlying technical issues, but that “some services will have a backlog of work to resolve, which may take longer to fully address.”
