An outage that affected web hosting giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) brought down vast swathes of the web, including websites, banks, and some government services.
Amazon announced Monday morning that the outage had been “fully alleviated” and that most services were returning to normal after a several-hour period in which much of the internet was unloadable.
The internet giant blamed the outage, which began around 3 a.m. on the U.S. East Coast, on DNS, the system that translates web addresses into IP addresses so customers’ apps and websites can load them.
Some issues can be resolved quickly, but DNS issues may take longer to resolve.
Some major apps didn’t work. Coinbase, Fortnite, Signal, and Zoom faced lengthy outages, as did Amazon’s own services, including Ring video surveillance products.
Millions of businesses and organizations rely on AWS to host their websites, apps, and other critical online systems. The company has data centers around the world, and Amazon is said to control at least 30% of the entire cloud market.
Amazon has not disclosed the cause of the outage.
Prior to this, the most recent global internet outage was in 2024, when cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike released a buggy update to its anti-malware engine that crashed millions of computers around the world, causing airport delays and large-scale outages. It took several days for systems around the world to return to normal.
Prior to that, in 2021, DNS provider Akamai suffered an outage that caused some of the world’s largest websites, including FedEx, Steam, and PlayStation Network, to be disconnected from the internet for several hours.
Source link
