Amazon Web Services (AWS) had a catastrophic outage on Thursday, wiping out websites and services for millions of people around the world. The disruption began to be reported around 4:30 PM AEST, leading to widespread issues for major companies, including gaming platforms and banking institutions.
By 7:01 PM AEST, AWS provided an update on its website, indicating that they were aware of the problems and were actively working towards a resolution. The company acknowledged it was due to issues with DNS resolution. These problems were specific to the DynamoDB API endpoint in the US-EAST-1 region.
Recovery Efforts and Timeline
As the situation developed, AWS provided a number of major appraisals of the recovery effort. At 8:03 PM AEST, the company announced that global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 had recovered. This was an incredibly important step in bringing back online capacity to impacted users and services.
Further progress was reported at 8:35 PM AEST, when AWS confirmed that the underlying DNS issue had been fully mitigated. Around this time we completed most of the service recovery. This is welcome news to residents impacted by the outage.
“We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS Services. We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered,” – AWS spokesperson
Impact on Major Platforms
Meanwhile, the outage had far-reaching repercussions for many major sites relying on an international infrastructure. Indeed, one of the largest online gaming platforms, Roblox, experienced major interruptions, leaving millions of users across the globe unhappy. Expanding beyond streaming, Snapchat, one of the most popular social media mobile apps, experienced a significant impact from the AWS outage.
In response to the outage, numerous financial institutions in the United Kingdom faced issues related to the failure. In just one incident, when service at Lloyds Bank and the Bank of Scotland largely failed for a weekend many customers were unable to access their accounts. Even major telecommunications companies like Vodafone and BT were brought to their knees, demonstrating just how pervasive AWS’s services are.
According to Downdetector, a platform that tracks outages, there was a notable spike in outage reports coinciding with the start of the AWS issues around 4:30 PM AEST. Their UK site as well reported major issues crippling service there.
Analysis of the Outage
Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity, did pinpoint what caused the outage. He told the outlet that it was all down to an unscheduled AWS outage. This disaster calls into serious question the reliability of all cloud services upon which countless companies now rely almost entirely for their operations.
“Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1,” – Aravind Srinivas
AWS said previously that they were pursuing several different parallel paths with the goal of restoring service more quickly during the outage. In wake of these events, join us to explore the vulnerabilities involved in cloud computing. We all know that outages can be very costly for businesses and disruptive for consumers.
