- Amazon Web Services outage was caused by a DNS error
- Websites were down for 70 minutes, full recovery took hours
- Big clients like Netflix, Spotify and Slack could have lost millions
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has shared more details about the recent major outage that took down many important websites and applications for almost a day.
The cloud hosting company’s incident was caused by a major outage in the US-East-1 AWS region, during which a DNS issue prevented services from reaching the DynamoDB API, which is used for high-performance, low-latency applications such as gaming, IoT, and e-commerce.
An internal EC2 subsystem also failed due to its dependency on DynamoDB, causing further delays.
AWS Outage: Details Confirmed
“After resolving the DynamoDB DNS issue, services began to recover, but we had a subsequent deterioration in the internal EC2 subsystem that is responsible for launching EC2 instances due to its dependency on DynamoDB,” Amazon’s status page confirmed (via The Registry).
After Amazon’s fix, an accelerated approach was undertaken to restore the systems, and by 3:01 pm PST, after about half a day, AWS had fully restored things. More or less.
“Some services such as AWS Config, Redshift and Connect continue to have a backlog of messages that they will finish processing in the next few hours,” the company explained.
cyber news Journalist Stefanie Schappert described the hours-long outage as a “perfect storm” for cyberattacks: Criminals often take advantage of widespread panic to push their own malicious campaigns with a sense of urgency.
“During major outages, users should avoid clicking on any links in emails, text messages, and pop-ups that claim to be able to fix the outage,” Schappert explained.
Since AWS customers were directly affected by the outage for about 70 minutes, DesignRush estimates that Netflix and Spotify could have lost $4.5 million and $2 million in revenue. The Slack outage could have also lost parent company Salesforce $1.13 million.
“When more than half of Fortune 500 companies rely on the same vendor, a single technical issue can ripple through the entire economy,” said DesignRush’s Anonta Khan.
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