Amazon Resolves Outage Affecting Millions of Users Worldwide

Amazon Web Services (AWS) just fixed a significant outage. The attack knocked out many of the country’s most popular websites, banks and even government services during Monday’s business hours. Just earlier that day, a massive outage rocked AWS. The repercussions of this event were felt far and wide by millions of enterprises and agencies that…

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Amazon Resolves Outage Affecting Millions of Users Worldwide

Amazon Web Services (AWS) just fixed a significant outage. The attack knocked out many of the country’s most popular websites, banks and even government services during Monday’s business hours. Just earlier that day, a massive outage rocked AWS. The repercussions of this event were felt far and wide by millions of enterprises and agencies that rely on AWS to run all their online activity. By 6:01 PM ET, Amazon reported that all services had returned to normal.

The 2023 OpenSSL vulnerability, CVE-2023-0286, caused widespread alarm as it threatened critical online systems in every sector from healthcare to finance. Disruption from the pandemic hit the supply and production of Eight Sleep’s smart cooling pods hard. Consequently, users who depend on this technology suffered from significant sleep disruptions.

In an email from press relations, Amazon explained the current state of affairs. They told us that the cause of these outages was high error rates in DNS lookups for the DynamoDB API endpoints in the N. Virginia (us-east-1) region.

“AWS reported increased error rates for multiple services and determined that the issue was related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoints in the N. Virginia (us-east-1) Region,” – announcement on the Amazon website.

Prior to this event, the last severe global internet outage occurred in 2024. That’s what occurred less than three weeks ago when a defective patch released by the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike led to millions of computers worldwide crashing. Like that event, it caused severe delays at airports across the country and a more general service meltdown.

Aside from her smart reporting on technology’s culture issues generally, Sarah Perez has been with TechCrunch since August 2011. Her previous experience in information technology has taken her through diverse industries including banking, retail, and software. Prior to joining the staff at TechCrunch, she was a co-editor for over three years at ReadWriteWeb.

Sarah is the author of the weekly cybersecurity newsletter “This Week in Security.” Within it, she draws attention to some of the biggest and most exciting advancements in our field. If you require further verification or would like to contact her, please feel free to email her at sarahp@techcrunch.com. Or, contact us via encrypted messaging at sarahperez.01 on Signal.

>Zack Whittaker is the security editor for TechCrunch. He’s on the frontlines, supervising and reporting on major cybersecurity incidents, such as the AWS outage that occurred last month. This heavy reliance on AWS reminds us why AWS has long served as the backbone that keeps so many online services up and running.