Amazon AWS Outage Exposes the Fragility of the Internet

Amazon AWS's Uninterrupted Service Finally Restarted

Amazon's AWS service is back online after a day-long outage affecting many companies and organizations nationwide and globally. This situation led to millions of websites and applications becoming inaccessible.

If you are one of the lucky few who unexpectedly took a day off from work or school, welcome. However, if you had a tougher Monday, it's time to say hello again to the benefits of the modern internet.

According to Amazon, the outage was caused by an issue in the US-EAST-1 data center located in Virginia. The problem was related to a domain name system (DNS) issue and Amazon's DynamoDB database service.

DNS and DynamoDB: The Cornerstones of the Internet

The domain name system serves as the internet's own phone book. It takes the URLs we type into the browser's address bar (for example, www.yahoofinance.com) and translates them into numerical IP addresses that computers can understand.

On the other hand, Amazon's DynamoDB database service allows customers to store and access data. The outage disrupted this system, bringing a large portion of many websites offline.

The Powerlessness of Cloud Providers

This situation highlights the fragility of the internet worldwide. Similar outages have not occurred for the first time, with Amazon experiencing incidents alongside other major cloud service providers like Microsoft and Google. A similar issue occurred in Amazon's AWS service in 2023, leading to many websites going offline. Additionally, a faulty update from CloudStrike shut down a large portion of Microsoft's cloud services in 2024.

The Financial World and Small Businesses

Large enterprises and government offices typically rely on multiple cloud providers. However, smaller companies and organizations may not have the financial resources to subscribe to multiple cloud services.

Will the recent outage bring significant changes for the future of the internet? It seems unlikely. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google will continue to dominate the cloud market. When one is down, the internet will continue to be affected.

At the very least, you might have gotten a day off.