- Amazon Web Services outage was caused by a DNS error
- Websites were down for 70 minutes, full recovery took hours
- Big clients like Netflix, Spotify and Slack may have lost millions
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has shared more details about the recent major outage that downed many major websites and applications for almost a day.
The cloud hosting company’s incident was caused by a major outage in the AWS US-East-1 region, during which a DNS issue prevented services from reaching the DynamoDB API, which is used for low-latency, high-throughput applications like gaming, IoT and e-commerce.
An internal EC2 subsystem had also failed due to its reliance on DynamoDB, causing additional delays.
AWS outage – details confirmed
“After resolving the DynamoDB DNS issue, services began to recover, but we had a subsequent deficiency in the internal EC2 subsystem that is responsible for launching EC2 instances due to its dependency on DynamoDB,” Amazon’s status page confirmed (via The register).
A limited approach to restoring systems took place following Amazon’s patch, and by 3:01 p.m. PT, after about half a day, AWS had fully restored things. Sort 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.
Cybernews Senior reporter Stefanie Schappert described the hours-long outage as a “perfect storm” for cyberattacks: Criminals typically exploit widespread panic to launch their own malicious campaigns with a sense of urgency.
“During major outages, users should avoid clicking on links in emails, texts and pop-ups claiming to be able to resolve the outage,” Schappert explained.
With AWS customers directly affected by the approximately 70-minute outage, DesignRush estimates that Netflix and Spotify could have lost $4.5 million and $2 million in revenue. The Slack outage could also have caused parent company Salesforce to lose $1.13 million.
“When more than half of the Fortune 500 companies rely on the same supplier, a single problem can ripple through the economy,” noted Anonta Khan of DesignRush.
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