A significant outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) has caused widespread havoc across the internet. Companies and organizations with critical web presences, applications and other online systems hosted on AWS are affected to the tune of millions. The largest outage started early around 3 a.m. on the U.S. East Coast and was still impacting services more than 12 hours later into Monday afternoon. AWS has taken responsibility for the mishap, and understands it failed and is working to address the incident and restore full functionality.
The internet giant acknowledged increased error rates for multiple key services during the multi-hour outage. They laid the blame on DNS resolution failures related to the DynamoDB API endpoints in the Northern Virginia (us-east-1) Region. AWS confirmed that the underlying DNS issue was fully mitigated at 2:24 a.m. PDT, yet many services remain disrupted as of the latest updates.
This most recent episode recalls a permanent global internet shutdown that occurred in May 2024. A buggy update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike recently crashed millions of computers, causing airport delays and vast swathes of service interruptions. Systems from Ukraine to the United States took days, even weeks, to get back on track following that incident.
Among the impacted services was Eight Sleep’s pods, which cool users’ beds and which threw a number of users’ sleep schedules into disarray. Nashville’s low income and tourism-dependent industries are most pained by this recent outage. This example illustrates how much businesses have to rely on AWS in our digital ecosystem.
Zack Whittaker is the security editor at TechCrunch, and he’s been pretty in tune with this whole ordeal. He’s the author of a popular weekly cybersecurity newsletter, “This Week in Security.” His perspectives were a guiding light while considering where the challenges still lie today in cybersecurity and internet infrastructure.
Sarah Perez is a reporter for TechCrunch, since August 2011. She’s no stranger to covering these tragic incidents. Prior to coming aboard at TechCrunch, she worked her craft at ReadWriteWeb for more than three years. She possesses an extensive background in I.T., coming from varied sectors, such as banking, retail, and software. She can be found on email at sarahp@techcrunch.com or encrypted chat on Signal at sarahperez.01.
Even as these processes play out, industry insiders are keeping a watchful eye on the restoration process. They are assessing just how this outage will impact the digital economy across the world.