Copyright Salt Lake City Deseret News
Early Monday, Amazon Web Services, the cloud backbone powering much of the internet, suffered a massive outage that lasted nearly 15 hours, disrupting hundreds of companies from Apple to McDonald’s, and even grounding parts of airline and finance operations. While most AWS services are now back online, the disruption has raised big questions: What caused it? Who felt it the most? And could it happen again? Who was affected? The outage revealed just how deeply AWS is embedded in everyday life. Apps like Snapchat, Venmo, Robinhood and Apple Music all went dark or slowed to a crawl. Even fast-food chains like McDonald’s and Wendy’s experienced disruptions. Airlines like Delta and United reported operational challenges, underscoring how much of the modern economy runs on Amazon’s cloud. What caused the outage? The chaotic cascade of malfunctions stemmed from a Domain Name System error — a common outage that can bring the internet a halt. Amazon said the glitch occurred at its data center plant in northern Virginia, one of the company’s oldest and biggest hubs. What is a DNS? DNS, short for Domain Name System, acts as the internet’s phone book. It translates easy-to-remember domain names (like Amazon.com) into numerical IP addresses that computers use to communicate. It like a digital delivery lookup system — users type a restaurant’s name and DNS finds that exact street address so your “data package” knows where to go. When DNS fails, it’s as if every delivery driver lost their map all at once. Could it happen again? This is not the first time Amazon has suffered an outage like this, and unfortunately it likely won’t be the last. Amazon’s previous major outage occurred in 2021, which affected everything from Disney amusement parks and Netflix streaming to robot vacuums and Adele ticket sales, according to Yahoo! Finance. Experts say total prevention is nearly impossible as long as so much of the internet depends on centralized systems like AWS. This incident has sparked a renewed scrutiny over the internet’s heavy reliance on centralized cloud infrastructure, according to Reuters. Was it a cyberattack? So far, Amazon says no. There is no evidence that the error was caused by a cyber attack. DNS outages can happen for any number of reasons, often due to maintenance issues, software bugs or human error. How much did it cost companies? The financial fallout could be staggering. Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint, told CNN the estimated financial impact of the AWS outage will total billions of dollars. “The 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,” Daoudi said in a statement to CNN. “The financial impact of this outage will easily reach into the hundreds of billions due to loss in productivity for millions of workers that cannot do their job, plus business operations that are stopped or delayed — from airlines to factories,” he continued. How did Amazon respond? Amazon identified the issue 12:11 a.m. PDT on Oct. 20, saying, “We are working to fully restore service as quickly as possible.” The company issued hourly updates throughout the day, confirming by 3:53 p.m. that the DNS issue had been “fully mitigated” and services were “succeeding normally.” What does this mean for Amazon’s reputation? Amazon remains the clear leader in cloud infrastructure, holding roughly one-third of the global market, according to Synergy Research Group, ahead of Microsoft and Google. Still, some analysts say the outage could push customers to diversify across multiple clouds. “The outage will likely fuel customers wanting to spread their infrastructure between multiple clouds, which could be a positive for smaller vendors like Google,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana told Yahoo! Finance. He continued to note that it is unlikely to lead to any meaningful market share loss for Amazon.
