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Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced late Monday night that it had finally resolved a massive outage that crippled a huge portion of the internet for over 16 hours.
The disruption affected more than 1,000 global apps and websites, including key services like Snapchat, the game Fortnite as well as major financial institutions such as Lloyds Bank and Halifax. Platform monitor Downdetector recorded a staggering 11 million user reports of problems globally during the peak of the blackout.
The core of the problem, according to an AWS update, was a malfunction at the heart of its operations in the US-East-1 region. The issue “appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint,” referring to the Domain Name System, which acts as the internet’s phone book.
When this critical component failed to translate website names into computer-readable numbers, it effectively caused widespread service chaos. Experts suggested that this initial failure triggered a series of “cascading failures” that Amazon struggled to contain throughout the day.
Even after Amazon fixed the underlying technical glitch, the episode highlighted the extreme fragility of modern digital life. Experts warned that reliance on just a few dominant cloud providers – namely Amazon, Microsoft and Google – creates an “unsustainable” supply concentration.
Professor Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey noted that the incident demonstrated how interdependent our infrastructure has become, warning that “small errors, often human made, can have widespread and significant impact.”
Cori Crider, head of the Future of Technology Institute, likened the failure to “a bridge collapsing,” taking a huge percentage of the global economy out with it. She argued that the status quo is highly risky: “Once you have a concentrated supply in a handful of monopoly providers, when something like this falls over, it takes a huge percentage of the economy out with it.”
The financial consequences of the outage are expected to be staggering too. Home delivery specialist Parcelhero estimated that the failure could cost businesses and retailers billions of dollars in lost revenue and service disruption, referencing a prior Crowdstrike incident that cost Fortune 500 companies $5.4 billion in losses. The impact on consumers, particularly those affected by banking issues, was also severe.
“An outage of this scale is incredibly rare, but with so many companies reliant on Amazon Web Services, millions of UK consumers are likely to have been impacted today,” said Jenny Ross, Editor of Which? Money. “Perhaps most worrying are reports that some of the UK’s biggest banks were out of action, with customers unable to make payments or access their banking apps.” She urged affected banks to ensure customers are swiftly compensated for any resulting losses.
Looking forward, experts suggest that responsibility lies not just with AWS, but with the companies that use its services. Ken Birman, a computer science professor at Cornell University, argued that many clients haven’t taken “adequate care to build protection systems into their applications.”
To prevent a recurrence, companies must invest heavily in resilience, namely, by backing up mission-critical applications across multiple providers. Others suggested a larger systemic shift is needed, recommending the industry move towards structural separations and the use of more local services to mitigate risks to security, sovereignty and the economy.
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