Common Problem Caused Massive AWS Outage

A massive Amazon Web Services outage caused widespread disruption early Monday and exposed what analysts say is a big problem with how the internet operates today—things are so centralized that a single failure can bring down many services. The glitch traced to an AWS data center in Virginia brought down thousands of websites, including social media platforms, retailers, banks, and government websites in the UK. Amazon services including Alexa were also affected.

• The cause. AWS said the outage was the result of Domain Name System—DNS—issues. Wired describes DNS as a "foundational internet service that essentially acts as an automatic phonebook lookup," translating URLs to numeric IP addresses. The main cause appeared to be problems with a system monitoring how much load was on the network, according to CNN.
• A common issue. "People who work in the tech industry will be rolling their eyes right now. This common error can cause a lot of havoc," writes Zoe Kleinman at the BBC. "'It's always DNS!' is something I hear a lot." DNS, she writes, "is supposed to act like a map," but it "lost its bearings" on Monday, and while platforms like Snapchat were still there, AWS "couldn't see where they were to direct traffic to them."

• "Cascading failures." "When the system couldn't correctly resolve which server to connect to, cascading failures took down services across the internet," David Ottenheimer at data infrastructure company Inrupt tells Wired. "Today's AWS outage is a classic availability problem, and we need to start seeing it more as data integrity failure."
• "Putting all your eggs in one basket." AWS is a huge part of the internet's infrastructure, with around a third of the cloud computing market. Its biggest rivals are Microsoft's Azure and Alphabet's Google Cloud Platform. The outage shows "how reliant we all are on the likes of Amazon, as well as Microsoft and Alphabet for many of the online services we more or less take for granted," says financial analyst Michael Hewson, per Le Monde. "On an economic level, it's almost akin to putting all of your economic eggs in one basket."
• No sign of a cyberattack. Cybersecurity expert Patrick Burgess tells the AP that there's no sign the outage was the result of a cyberattack. "This looks like a good old-fashioned technology issue—something's gone wrong and it will be fixed by Amazon," he says. Burgess notes that with just three or four big companies sharing the cloud computing market, an issue like this can bring down a "broad spectrum" of services. "The world now runs on the cloud," he says.
• Cost could be "hundreds of billions." With problems persisting for some companies Monday afternoon, Mehdi Daoudi, chief of internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint, estimates the outage could cost companies hundreds of billions. "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."