Amazon’s DNS Outage: A Billion-Dollar Web Blackout
▼ Summary
– Amazon resolved a major AWS outage on Monday that disrupted millions of internet users globally.
– The outage was the worst since last year’s CrowdStrike incident, affecting over 28 AWS services and causing billions in estimated damages.
– Services like Snapchat, Reddit, banks, airlines, and Amazon’s own platforms were disrupted, halting business operations and payments.
– An expert highlighted the internet’s fragility and the outage’s financial impact, potentially reaching hundreds of billions due to lost productivity.
– The outage originated at Amazon’s oldest and largest US web services site, which had previous outages in 2020 and 2021 despite mitigation efforts.
The recent Amazon Web Services outage sent shockwaves across the digital world, bringing countless online platforms and business operations to a sudden halt. Amazon confirmed on Monday that the massive disruption affecting its cloud hosting services had finally been resolved, but not before millions of internet users and companies felt the impact.
This incident is being described as the most severe since the CrowdStrike outage last year, creating what Reuters termed “global turmoil.” Given that AWS operates as the planet’s largest cloud provider, it effectively functions as the backbone for a huge portion of the internet. Reports indicate that more than 28 distinct AWS services experienced failures, with one analyst telling CNN that the financial damages could potentially reach into the billions of dollars.
The effects were immediate and widespread. Major applications including Snapchat, Signal, and Reddit became inaccessible. Air travel faced significant delays, and numerous banks and financial services were knocked offline. Gamers found themselves locked out of massive titles like Fortnite. Even Amazon’s own ecosystem suffered, with its e-commerce platform, Alexa, and Prime Video services all going down. The result was a complete operational standstill for millions of businesses, which could not log employees into essential systems or process customer payments.
Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of the internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint, explained to CNN that the event underscores the internet’s inherent complexity and fragility. He emphasized how deeply modern work and commerce rely on a functioning digital infrastructure. The financial fallout from this outage is expected to be staggering, easily climbing into the hundreds of billions due to lost productivity for millions of idled workers and the complete stoppage or delay of critical business operations across sectors like airlines and manufacturing.
The root of Amazon’s troubles was traced to a specific US data center, noted by Reuters as its oldest and largest facility for web services. This location frequently serves as the default region for many AWS offerings. While this same site suffered two previous outages in 2020 and 2021, and the tech giant had assured customers that those issues were “fully mitigated,” the recent collapse demonstrates that those earlier fixes were insufficient to guarantee stability into 2025.
(Source: Ars Technica)
