Downdetector recorded more than 11m user reports over Monday\u2019s AWS-linked outage.<\/p>\n
Earlier this week, Amazon nearly \u201cbroke the internet\u201d, as the saying goes, but not in a good way.<\/p>\n
On Monday morning (20 October), a disruption within Amazon Web Services<\/a> (AWS), negatively affected several dozen websites, including Amazon, Perplexity, Canva, Signal and Atlassian, just to name a few.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the BBC reported that several banks<\/a>\u00a0were also affected, with customers facing issues including card payments being declined. In addition, UK government websites were also impacted by the disruption. Downdetector had recorded more than 11m user reports globally during the outage on Monday.<\/p>\n In a lengthy statement yesterday (23 October), the company explained that the incident was triggered by a latent defect within its automated DNS management system that caused endpoint resolution failures for DynamoDB.<\/p>\n DynamoDB maintains hundreds of thousands of DNS records. It uses automation to monitor the system and ensure capacity is added as required, hardware failures are handled and traffic is distributed efficiently.<\/p>\n AWS explained that the a \u201clatent race condition\u201d in the DynamoDB DNS management system resulted in an incorrect empty DNS record for the service\u2019s Virginia-based US-East-1 datacentre region \u2013 something that the automation failed to repair. The error required manual operator intervention to correct.<\/p>\n While AWS took a little more than half a day to fully resolve the issue, the incident was enough for many to realise how the backbone of the internet is held up by a small number of companies.<\/p>\n AWS leads this game by a large margin, holding around 6pc of the web hosting market, or around 50m live websites, according to data from Kinsta.<\/p>\n \u201cThe financial impact of this outage will easily reach into the hundreds of billions\u201d, commented Mehdi Daoudi, the CEO of internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint, in a statement to CNN<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThe incident highlights the complexity and fragility of the internet, as well as how much every aspect of our work depends on the internet to work.\u201d<\/p>\n