The A-Z of the AWS outage: What happened, why and what’s next

Amazon Web Services,  a cloud computing provider, experienced an hour-long outage, causing major disruption across the globe.

Amazon Web Services,  a cloud computing provider that hosts many of the world’s most-used online services, experienced an hour-long outage, causing major disruption across the globe.

However, the company acknowledged it and said engineers were immediately engaged to actively work on both mitigating the issue and fully understanding the root cause. 

It’s worth mentioning that even the Redmond giant Microsoft had a major disruption last year in its cloud services, affecting numerous businesses around the world.

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing service that offers a variety of IT resources, such as virtual servers, storage solutions, and databases, accessible over the internet.

This platform enables both businesses and individuals to develop and operate applications without the need to manage physical hardware.

It takes care of operational challenges, including data centre management, power supply, and cooling systems, while also providing scalability and dependability.

What caused this disruption?

Amazon’s cloud service faced a significant outage around 07:11 GMT, disrupting various apps and websites, including banks and gaming services.

“Between 11:49 PM PDT (6:49 AM GMT) on October 19 and 2:24 AM PDT on October 20, AWS experienced increased error rates for AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region, which also impacted Amazon.com and Amazon subsidiaries, as well as AWS Support operations,” says the company.

The problem originated from a technical update to DynamoDB, a crucial database, at one of its main data centres in Virginia.

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed, serverless NoSQL database service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS)

“By 12:26 AM PDT on October 20, we determined that the event was the result of DNS (Domain Name System) resolution issues for the regional DynamoDB service endpoints, and mitigated the issue by 2:24 AM PDT,” adds the company in the statement.

This update caused an error in the Domain Name System (DNS), which is essential for apps to find server addresses.

As a result, apps struggled to connect to the DynamoDB API, leading to failures in other AWS services as well.

In total, 113 services were affected, says the reports.

“To facilitate full recovery, we temporarily throttled some impaired operations such as EC2 instance launches. By 12:28 PM PDT, many AWS customers and AWS services were seeing significant recovery. We continued to reduce throttling of EC2 new instance launch operations while we worked to mitigate the remaining impact. By 3:01 PM PDT, all AWS services returned to normal operations,” adds the company.

Affected services with 11M user complaints

At present, AWS is used by thousands of other companies for storage, databases or web hosting.

DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, reported over 11 million user complaints about issues with more than 2,500 companies, including Roblox, Fortnite, Robinhood, the McDonald’s app, Netflix, and Disney+.

The outage affected numerous websites and apps, including Snapchat, Pinterest, and Apple TV, as reported by Downdetector.

Other impacted services included WhatsApp, Signal, Zoom, Slack, and gaming platforms like Roblox and Fortnite. Businesses like Starbucks and Etsy also faced disruptions.

In the U.S., financial apps, such as Venmo, were down, and some users experienced problems with Ring doorbells and Alexa devices. Issues were reported when accessing Amazon and downloading books on Kindles.

Additionally, the language app Duolingo and design tool Canva had website errors, along with media outlets like the Associated Press, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

Banks, the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and the AI company Perplexity were also affected, as were U.S. airlines Delta and United, reports Al-Jazeera.