Why the Internet went out while you were sleeping: Amazon Web Services outage explained

The Internet started the week the way many of us often want to: by refusing to go to work. An Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage left large portions of the internet unavailable Monday morning, with sites and services including Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo, PlayStation Network, and, as expected, Amazon unavailable for a short period of time.

The outage began shortly after midnight PT, and took about three and a half hours for Amazon to fully resolve. Social networks and live streaming services were affected, but vital services such as online banking were also halted. You will likely find most sites and services operating as usual this morning, but some knock-on effects are likely to appear throughout the day.

AWS is an Amazon-owned cloud provider that supports large parts of the Internet, so when it went down, it took over many of the services we know and love. As is the case with quickly and Mass strike Service Outages Over the past few years, AWS outages show how much the Internet relies on the same infrastructure — and how quickly our access to the sites and services we rely on is revoked when something goes wrong. Relying on a small number of major companies to support the Internet is like putting all our eggs in a small handful of baskets.

When it works, it’s great, but it only takes one thing to go wrong and the Internet is brought to its knees in a matter of minutes.

Just after midnight PT on October 20, AWS first recorded an issue on its site Service status pageSaying it is “investigating the increased error rates and response times for multiple AWS services in the US-East-1 region.” At around 2 a.m. PT, it said it had identified the likely root cause of the problem, and within half an hour, it began implementing mitigation measures that led to significant signs of recovery.

“The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS service operations are now succeeding normally,” AWS said at 3:35 a.m. PT. The company did not respond to a request for further comment other than to return us to the AWS Health Dashboard.

At a time when AWS says it first started noticing error rates, Downdetector saw reports starting to rise across several online services, including banks, airlines and phone companies. While AWS has resolved the issue, some of these reports have seen a decrease, while others have not yet returned to normal. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)

At around 4 a.m. PT, Reddit was still down, while services including Ring, Verizon, and YouTube were still seeing a large number of reported issues.

What caused the AWS outage?

AWS hasn’t shared full details about why the Internet fell off a cliff this morning. It’s likely that the fix has now been deployed, and his next step will be to investigate what went wrong.

So far, the outage has been attributed to a “DNS issue.” DNS stands for Domain Name System and refers to the service that translates human-readable Internet addresses (for example, CNET.com) into machine-readable IP addresses that connect browsers to websites.

When a DNS error occurs, the translation process cannot be performed, resulting in the connection being interrupted. DNS errors are common and are common roadblocks on the Internet, but they usually occur on a small scale, affecting individual sites or services. But given the widespread use of AWS, a DNS error can lead to equally widespread consequences.

DNS issues can be caused by malicious actors, but there is no evidence at this point to suggest that this is the case for the AWS outage.

However, technical bugs can pave the way for hackers to find and exploit vulnerabilities when companies roll back and defenses fail, according to Marius Bridis, CTO at NordVPN. “This is as much a cybersecurity issue as it is a technical issue,” he said in a statement. “True online security isn’t just about keeping hackers out, it’s also about ensuring you can stay connected and protected when systems fail.”

Bridis added that in the coming hours, people should be on the lookout for scammers hoping to take advantage of people’s awareness of service outages. You should be very wary of phishing attacks and emails asking you to change your password to protect your account.