Amazon's DNS problem knocked out half the web, likely costing billions

"Considered the worst outage since last year's CrowdStrike chaos, Amazon's outage caused "global turmoil," Reuters reported. AWS is the world's largest cloud provider and, therefore, the "backbone of much of the Internet," ZDNet noted. Ultimately, more than 28 AWS services were disrupted, causing perhaps billions in damages, one analyst estimated for CNN. Popular apps like Snapchat, Signal, and Reddit went dark. Flights got delayed. Banks and financial services went down. Massive games like Fortnite could not be accessed."

""The incident highlights the complexity and fragility of the Internet, as well as how much every aspect of our work depends on the Internet to work," Mehdi Daoudi, the CEO of an Internet performance monitoring firm called Catchpoint, told CNN. "The financial impact of this outage will easily reach into the hundreds of billions due to loss in productivity for millions of workers that cannot do their job, plus business operations that are stopped or delayed-from airlines to factories.""

"Amazon's problems originated at a US site that is its "oldest and largest for web services" and often "the default region for many AWS services," Reuters noted. The same site has experienced two outages before in 2020 and 2021, but while the tech giant had confirmed that those prior issues had been "fully mitigated," apparently the fixes did not ensure stability into 2025."

An outage at Amazon Web Services' cloud hosting was confirmed resolved on Monday afternoon. The outage disrupted more than 28 AWS services and triggered widespread interruptions across the Internet. Popular apps including Snapchat, Signal, and Reddit went dark, flights were delayed, banks and financial services experienced outages, and large games like Fortnite became inaccessible. Amazon's own services, including its e-commerce platform, Alexa, and Prime Video, were affected. Millions of businesses could not log employees in or accept payments. The outage originated in a U.S. region described as AWS's oldest and largest, which had experienced prior outages in 2020 and 2021. An analyst estimated the financial impact could reach into the hundreds of billions.

Read at Ars Technica