Amazon Web Services has issued a positive update after a widespread outage disrupted numerous of the world’s biggest apps and websites.
According to Reuters, Amazon’s cloud service late on Monday, October 20, announced that it has “resolved” the issue and it has “returned to normal operations” after a massive outage.
The massive outage that began early on Monday affected more than 1,000 apps and websites, including Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, Apple TV, WhatsApp, Signal, Zoom, Slack, Roblox, Fortnite and Xbox, Canva, Duolingo and banking apps such as Lloyds and Halifax.
Despite the Amazon announcement, some of the AWS services showed a backlog message that could take a few hours to process.
Furthermore, although Amazon has now fixed the issue, experts have voiced concerns about so many companies depending upon only one provider.
Prof. Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey said, “What this episode has highlighted is just how interdependent our infrastructure is. So many online services rely upon third parties for their physical infrastructure, and this shows that problems can occur in even the largest of those third-party providers. Small errors, often human-made, can have widespread and significant impact."
What caused AWS outage?
Amazon has not yet issued any official statement regarding the outage and causes behind the global disruption.
In a brief update on its service status web on Monday, the cloud computing company wrote that the issue "appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1."
This means that the problem began with a mistake in an update that has affected the Domain Name System (DNS).
DNS works like a phonebook for the internet that turns website names into the numeric IP addresses. Due to a DNS issue, the apps could not find the address for DynamoDB, failing to connect to servers.
