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A huge took down a massive portion of the internet, Monday. Hours after the issue was reported, AWS called the outage a DNS issue. The service that translates human-readable internet addresses into machine-readable internet addresses. When you type Amazon.com, it doesn't matter what name you use, what matters is the actual internet protocol number," said Ramnath Chellappa, an information systems expert at Emory University's Goizueta Business School. AWS is a cloud computing platform that provides IT resources like computing power and storage over the internet. Market research firm Gartner reported that in 2024, AWS accounted for 37% of the global market share, with customers like the NFL, Capital One, Disney and the U.S. Army. I think we can say that one small AWS glitch and then the whole digital world needs a reboot," Chellappa said. The outage Monday affected people and businesses all across the world. According to CNET, Downdetector saw over 9.8 million reports, including 2.7 million coming from the U.S. and 1.1 million from the UK. That included United Airlines, McDonald's and Venmo. Amazon said late Monday afternoon its systems are mostly back online. We continue to observe recovery across all AWS services," Amazon said. Chief Information Officer at Cedarville University, Micah Cooper told The National News Desk, the outage doesn't seem to be linked to a cyber attack, including foreign actors or organized crime. Your nation state does not want to be discovered. Your nation state wants to slip in, obtain data and lay quietly and never be discovered," Cooper said. But Chellappa warns this outage is a good reminder of why cyber security is so important especially as the world becomes more centralized all over again. If something happens there, that impact is going to cascade and we're going to see it at multiple levels," Chellappa said. This isn't the first time AWS experienced an outage. In 2023, many internet services were affected by a brief outage. Also in late 2021, a wide range of businesses were affected for more than five hours.
