What the Huge AWS Outage Reveals About the Internet

Amazon Web Services experienced DNS resolution issues on Monday morning, taking down wide swaths of the web--and highlighting a longstanding weakness in the internet's infrastructure. A massive cloud outage stemming from Amazon Web Services's key US-EAST-1 region, its hub near the United States capitol in northern Virginia, caused widespread disruptions of websites and platforms around the world on Monday morning. Amazon's main e-commerce platform and other properties including Ring doorbells and the Alexa smart assistant suffered interruptions and outages throughout the morning, as did Meta's communication platform WhatsApp, OpenAI's ChatGPT, PayPal's Venmo payment platform, multiple web services from Epic Games, multiple British government sites, and many others. The outages stemmed from Amazon's "DynamoDB" database application programming interfaces in US-EAST-1, and AWS said in status updates that the problem was specifically related to DNS resolution issues. The "Domain Name System" is a foundational internet service that essentially acts as an automatic phonebook lookup to translate web URLs like "www.wired.com"