On October 20, a major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) disrupted large parts of the internet, affecting popular services like Snapchat, Venmo, Fortnite, and Amazon itself, according to CNET. The issue, traced to a DNS problem in AWS’s US-EAST-1 region, began just after midnight PT and was mostly resolved by early morning. The incident highlights the internet’s heavy reliance on a few key infrastructure providers, making widespread disruptions increasingly common when one goes down. They write:
The internet kicked off the week the way that many of us often feel like doing: by refusing to go to work. An outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) rendered huge portions of the internet unavailable on Monday morning, with sites and services including Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo, the PlayStation Network and, predictably, Amazon, unavailable for a short period of time.
AWS is a cloud services provider owned by Amazon that props up huge portions of the internet. […]
Just after midnight PT on October 20, AWS first registered an issue on its service status page, saying it was “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.” Around 2 a.m. PT, it said it had identified a potential root cause of the issue, and within half an hour, it had started applying mitigations that were resulting in significant signs of recovery. […]
Around 4 a.m. PT, Reddit was still down, while services including Verizon and YouTube were still seeing a significant number of reported issues.
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