What the Amazon cloud outage reveals about the weaknesses of the internet

"Signal messages. A Pokemon hunt. Ticket sales for the much-awaited tour of Spanish pop band La Oreja de Van Gogh. Even the brand Eight Sleep's smart beds, which became stuck in an inclined position and began to roast customers alive. The services and applications of more than 2,000 companies around the world were affected on Monday by an outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon's cloud computing platform and perhaps the most important site amid the internet's plumbing."

"According to the website Downdetector, which monitors web activity, within a few hours there had been up to 8.1 million complaints from users around the globe. Many of the fallen services were back up and running after a few hours, but a few continued to experience problems throughout the day. On Monday night, Amazon released a statement that AWS had returned to normal levels."

"The chaos began at 3:11 a.m. on the East Coast. Amazon data center region US-EAST-1 in North Virginia registered the first failures: increased latency, connection errors and domain name or DNS resolution failures, which allow you to visit a web page when you type its address into your browser. The outages affected thousands of platforms, games, apps and systems (Snapchat, Fortnite, Duolingo, Canva, Alexa, etc.) that rely on AWS."

"The primary cause was a failure in the DNS resolution of access points to DynamoDB, an internal database on which many AWS services depend. Although the problem was resolved within a few hours, the dependency caused many services to stop working properly, leading to a chain of failures that took many hours to fully mitigate. Amazon has declined to provide further details."

An AWS outage beginning at 3:11 a.m. ET originated in the US-EAST-1 North Virginia region, causing increased latency, connection errors and DNS resolution failures. More than 2,000 companies' services and applications experienced interruptions, affecting platforms including Signal, Snapchat, Fortnite, Duolingo, Canva, Alexa and Eight Sleep. The primary cause was a failure in DNS resolution of access points to DynamoDB, an internal AWS database used by many services. The outage generated up to 8.1 million user complaints reported by Downdetector. Many services recovered within hours, though some remained impaired through the day. Amazon later stated AWS returned to normal and declined further detail.

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