"A massive cloud outage stemming from Amazon Web Services's key US-EAST-1 region, its hub near the United States capitol in northern Virginia, caused widespread disruptions of websites and platforms around the world on Monday morning. Amazon's main e-commerce platform and other properties including Ring doorbells and the Alexa smart assistant suffered interruptions and outages throughout the morning, as did Meta's communication platform WhatsApp, OpenAI's ChatGPT, PayPal's Venmo payment platform, multiple web services from Epic Games, multiple British government sites, and many others."
"The outages stemmed from Amazon's "DynamoDB" database application programming interfaces in US-EAST-1, and AWS said in status updates that the problem was specifically related to DNS resolution issues. The "Domain Name System" is a foundational internet service that essentially acts as an automatic phonebook lookup to translate web URLs like "www.wired.com" into numeric server IP addresses so web browsers show users the right content."
""Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1," AWS wrote in status updates on Monday. Shortly after the company added: "If you are still experiencing an issue resolving the DynamoDB service endpoints in US-EAST-1, we recommend flushing your DNS caches." An AWS spokesperson did not immediately respond when asked for details about the nature of the failure."
A DNS resolution failure in Amazon Web Services' US-EAST-1 region, tied to the DynamoDB API endpoints, triggered widespread interruptions across numerous major platforms. Amazon's e-commerce site, Ring doorbells, Alexa, WhatsApp, ChatGPT, Venmo, Epic Games services, and multiple British government sites experienced outages. DNS translates human-readable web addresses into numeric IP addresses, and incorrect resolution can provide wrong addresses or fail to connect. AWS status updates linked the problem to DynamoDB DNS resolution and recommended flushing DNS caches. AWS did not provide further technical details. DNS hijacking is a known malicious vector, but there was no indication that the outage resulted from nefarious activity.
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