Downdetector recorded more than 11m user reports related to Monday’s AWS outage.
Earlier this week, Amazon nearly “broke the internet”, as the saying goes, but not in a good way.
On Monday morning (20 October), a disruption within Amazon Web Services (AWS) negatively affected several dozen websites, including Amazon, Perplexity, Canva, Signal and Atlassian, just to name a few.
And the BBC reported that several banks were also affected, with customers facing issues including card payments being declined. In addition, UK government websites were also impacted by the disruption. Downdetector recorded more than 11m user reports globally during the outage on Monday.
In a lengthy statement yesterday (23 October), AWS explained that the incident was triggered by a latent defect in its automated DNS management system that caused endpoint resolution failures for DynamoDB.
DynamoDB maintains hundreds of thousands of DNS records. It uses automation to monitor the system and ensure capacity is added as required, hardware failures are handled and traffic is distributed efficiently.
AWS explained that the a “latent race condition” in the DynamoDB DNS management system resulted in an incorrect empty DNS record for the service’s Virginia-based US-East-1 datacentre region – something that the automation failed to repair. The error required manual operator intervention to correct.
While AWS took a little more than half a day to fully resolve the issue, the incident was enough for many to realise how the backbone of the internet is held up by a small number of companies.
AWS leads this game by a large margin, holding around 6pc of the web hosting market, or around 50m live websites, according to data from Kinsta.
While, in terms of cloud infrastructure, AWS holds roughly 30pc of the market. “The heavy reliance of the global internet on just a few major providers – AWS, Azure and Google Cloud – creates profound risks for both businesses and everyday users,” said Dr Jongkil Jay Jeong.
“The financial impact of this outage will easily reach into the hundreds of billions,” Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet performance monitoring company Catchpoint, commented to CNN.
“The incident highlights the complexity and fragility of the internet, as well as how much every aspect of our work depends on the internet to work.”
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