{"id":91566,"date":"2025-10-21T06:28:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T06:28:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/91566\/"},"modified":"2025-10-21T06:28:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T06:28:12","slug":"what-to-know-about-the-amazon-web-services-outage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/91566\/","title":{"rendered":"What to know about the Amazon Web Services outage"},"content":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Internet disruptions tied to Amazon\u2019s cloud computing service<\/a> affected people around the world Monday trying to connect to online services used for work, social media and video games.<\/p>\n

About three hours after the outage began, Amazon Web Services said it was starting to recover from the problem.<\/a> But the company later said it was continuing to respond to \u201csignificant\u201d errors and connectivity issues across multiple services.<\/p>\n

What is Amazon Web Services<\/p>\n

Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing provider that hosts many of the world\u2019s most-used online services. AWS provides behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure to many government departments, universities and businesses<\/p>\n

Seattle-based Amazon said the problems were centered in its Virginia-based US-EAST-1 data center region, one of its most important cloud hubs around the world. The region is a backbone \u201cfor so many services that when things go screwy, domino effects around the internet-as-we-know-it are enormous,\u201d wrote John Scott-Railton, a cybersecurity researcher at Citizen Lab, in a social media post.<\/p>\n

What happened?<\/p>\n

AWS traced the source of the problem to something called the \u201cDynamoDB endpoint in the US-East-1 Region,\u201d in a pair of jargon-laden updates.<\/p>\n

\u201cDynamoDB isn\u2019t a term that most consumers know, but it underpins the apps and services that all of us use every single day,\u201d said cybersecurity expert Mike Chapple.<\/p>\n

DynamoDB is a centralized database service that many internet-based services use to track user information, store key data and manage their operations, Chapple said by email.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s \u201cone of the record-keepers of the modern internet,\u201d said Chapple, an IT professor at the University of Notre Dame\u2019s Mendoza College of Business. \u201cIt\u2019s fast, it\u2019s cheap, and it\u2019s reliable. But today it stopped working and we saw the effects of that outage ripple across the internet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amazon\u2019s updates suggest the problem isn\u2019t with the database itself, but rather that something went wrong with the records that tell other systems where to find their data, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAmazon had the data safely stored, but nobody else could find it for several hours, leaving apps temporarily separated from their data. It\u2019s as if large portions of the internet suffered temporary amnesia,\u201d Chapple said.<\/p>\n

Amazon has attributed the outage to a domain name system issue. DNS is the service that translates internet addresses into machine-readable IP addresses that connects browsers and apps with websites and underlying web services. DNS errors disrupt the translation process, interrupting the connection.<\/p>\n

Because so many sites and services use AWS, a DNS error can have widespread results.<\/p>\n

Who was affected?<\/p>\n

Internet users around the world faced widespread disruption because Amazon\u2019s problem took down dozens of major online services, including social media site Snapchat, the Roblox and Fortnite video games and chat app Signal.<\/p>\n

On DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, users reported issues with Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, online broker Robinhood, the McDonald\u2019s app and many other services.<\/p>\n

Starbucks experienced \u201ca very limited impact for a very short amount of time\u201d to its app, but all stores were serving customers normally, Starbucks Global Communications Director Jaci Anderson said in an email to The Associated Press.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur mobile order ahead and pay app is working normally to serve our customers this morning,\u201d Anderson said midmorning.<\/p>\n

DoorDash said its systems were not directly affected but some of its partners \u201cexperienced brief disruptions\u201d affecting deliveries.<\/p>\n

The risks of centralized cloud services<\/p>\n

Some cybersecurity experts have warned for years about the potentially ugly consequences of allowing a handful of big tech companies to dominate key internet operations.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo much of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) compute companies who provide the underlying infrastructure that when there\u2019s an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad range, a broad spectrum\u201d of online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at U.K.-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe world now runs on the cloud,\u201d and the internet is seen as a utility like water or electricity, as we spend so much of our lives on our smartphones, Burgess said.<\/p>\n

And because so much of the online world\u2019s plumbing is underpinned by a handful of companies, when something goes wrong, \u201cit\u2019s very difficult for users to pinpoint what is happening because we don\u2019t see Amazon, we just see Snapchat or Roblox,\u201d Burgess said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe good news is that this kind of issue is usually relatively fast (to resolve)\u201d and there\u2019s no indication that it was caused by a cyber incident like a cyberattack, Burgess said.<\/p>\n

Has this happened in the past?<\/p>\n

This is not the first time a problem with Amazon\u2019s key services has caused widespread disruptions.<\/p>\n

Many popular internet services and publishers were down after a brief outage in 2023. AWS\u2019s longest outage in recent history occurred in late 2021, when companies \u2014 everything from airline reservations and auto dealerships to payment apps and video streaming services \u2014 were affected for more than five hours. Other major outages happened in 2020 and 2017.<\/p>\n

Unrelated to Amazon, a faulty software update by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike affecting devices running Microsoft\u2019s Windows also rippled across the world to cause massive disruptions in 2024.<\/p>\n

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