article
 Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Services are being restored after AT&T and Amazon Web Services temporarily experienced outages Saturday morning, according to Downdetector.Â
What we know:
According to the website that tracks outages, the outages started around 8 a.m.
The AT&T outages were mostly concentrated in major urban areas such as Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, St. Louis and Chicago.Â
The Amazon Web Services outages were mostly concentrated in major cities such as New York and Chicago.Â
What we don’t know:
FOX Television Stations has reached out to AT&T and Amazon Web Services for comment regarding the outages.Â
Second Amazon outage within a weekÂ
The backstory:
Internet disruptions tied to Amazon’s cloud computing service affected people around the world earlier this week trying to connect to online services used for work, social media and video games.
About three hours after the outage began, Amazon Web Services said it was starting to recover from the problem. But the company later said it was continuing to respond to “significant” errors and connectivity issues across multiple services.
RELATED: Amazon Web Services outage causes issues for apps, websites worldwide
AWS traced the source of the problem to something called the “DynamoDB endpoint in the US-East-1 Region,” in a pair of jargon-laden updates.
What is Amazon Web Services (AWS)?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud platform offered by Amazon that stores its customers’ data, runs their online activities and more.
“DynamoDB isn’t a term that most consumers know, but it underpins the apps and services that all of us use every single day,” said cybersecurity expert Mike Chapple.
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.
It’s “one of the record-keepers of the modern internet,” said Chapple, an IT professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. “It’s fast, it’s cheap, and it’s reliable. But today it stopped working and we saw the effects of that outage ripple across the internet.”
Amazon’s updates suggest the problem isn’t with the database itself, but rather that something went wrong with the records that tell other systems where to find their data, he said.
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.
Because so many sites and services use AWS, a DNS error can have widespread results.
The Source: The Associated Press contributed to this report. The information in this story comes from Downdetector, a website that tracks service outages, as well as previous reports from Amazon Web Services about recent technical issues. This story was reported from Los Angeles.Â