- The Amazon Web Services outage was caused by a DNS error
- Websites were down for 70 minutes, a full recovery took hours
- Big customers like Netflix, Spotify and Slack may have lost millions
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has shared more details about the recent major outage, which took many major websites and apps down for nearly a day.
The cloud hosting company’s incident was caused by a major outage in AWS’s US-East-1 region, where a DNS issue prevented services from reaching the DynamoDB API, which is used for low-latency, high-throughput applications such as gaming, IoT and e-commerce.
An internal EC2 subsystem had also failed due to its dependency on DynamoDB, causing additional delays.
AWS outage – details confirmed
“After resolving the DynamoDB DNS issue, services began to recover, but we had a subsequent vulnerability in the internal EC2 subsystem responsible for launching EC2 instances due to its dependency on DynamoDB,” Amazon’s status page confirmed (via The register).
A scaled-down approach to restoring systems took place after Amazon’s fix, and by 3:01 PM PT after about half a day, AWS had fully restored things. Kind of.
“Some services such as AWS Config, Redshift, and Connect continue to have a backlog of messages that they will finish processing over the next few hours,” the company explained.
Cyber news Senior journalist Stefanie Schappert described the hour-long outage as a “perfect storm” for cyber attacks – criminals typically take advantage of the widespread panic to push their own malicious campaigns with a sense of urgency.
“During major outages, users should avoid clicking on links in emails, texts and pop-ups that claim to be able to fix the outage,” Schappert explained.
With AWS customers 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, respectively. Slack’s outage could have also cost parent company Salesforce $1.13 million.
“When more than half of the Fortune 500 rely on the same provider, a single mistake can reverberate through the economy,” noted DesignRush’s Anonta Khan.
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