Amazon technical error causes global internet to "freeze"

(NLDO) - Amazon Corporation announced that it has completely restored cloud computing services after a technical problem caused a series of internet platforms to be disrupted.

A widespread outage of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing platform on October 20 caused the global internet to falter for hours, paralyzing a series of essential applications and services.

The incident not only caused huge financial losses but also sounded the alarm about the fragility of the world's digital infrastructure.

The issue stemmed from a simple technical error at AWS's US-EAST-1 data center in Northern Virginia, which prevented the DNS system from properly routing requests to the DynamoDB database service.

The Hulu mobile app displays an unavailable message during an Amazon Web Services outage on October 20. Photo: AP

However, the incident quickly spread, crashing services from games, social networks to finance and government .

Financial apps like Coinbase, Robinhood, Venmo were experiencing issues, along with major UK banks (Lloyds, Halifax). Businesses like Starbucks, T-Mobile and United Airlines all reported issues, leading to flight delays and manufacturing disruptions.

Secure communication services like Signal were affected, raising concerns about information security. Even British government agencies and the US health service (Medicare) were also affected, directly affecting people's tax payments and insurance registration.

Although Amazon largely fixed the problem by the same evening, the estimated economic loss had reached staggering levels.

Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint, estimated the total financial impact of the outage “could be in the hundreds of billions of dollars,” largely due to lost productivity for millions of employees worldwide who were unable to use online tools to do their jobs.

Many experts say the incident has exposed a major risk: the entire online world is too dependent on a few giant service providers.

According to the US information technology research and consulting firm Gartner, AWS is the largest cloud service provider, accounting for more than 41% of the market share. Therefore, just a small mistake by Amazon can cause global instability.

CBC reports that this is the third time in five years that the US-EAST-1 data center (AWS's largest and oldest center) has suffered a major incident. This shows that the risk is not decreasing but recurring.

US-EAST-1 has been the site of several network outages over the years, most notably in late 2021 when a network error involving the Kinesis service crippled major apps like Netflix and Disney+ for more than five hours.

Previously, in 2017, a human error (wrong command input) during S3 service debugging also caused a chain incident, crashing a series of websites.

Source: https://nld.com.vn/loi-ky-thuat-cua-amazon-khien-mang-internet-toan-cau-dung-hinh-196251021112352562.htm