An Amazon technical glitch brought the global internet to a standstill.

(NLĐO) - Amazon announced that it has fully restored its cloud computing services after a technical incident that disrupted numerous internet platforms.

The widespread outage of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing platform on October 20th caused global internet disruptions for hours, paralyzing a range of essential applications and services.

This incident not only caused enormous financial damage but also sounded an alarm about the fragility of the world's digital infrastructure.

The incident stemmed from a simple technical error at AWS's US-EAST-1 data center, located in northern Virginia, USA. This error prevented the DNS system from properly routing access requests to the DynamoDB database service.

The Hulu mobile app displayed an "unavailable" message throughout the Amazon Web Services outage on October 20. Photo: AP

However, the outage quickly spread, disrupting services ranging from games and social media to finance and government .

Financial apps like Coinbase, Robinhood, and Venmo experienced problems, along with major UK banks (Lloyds, Halifax). Businesses such as Starbucks, T-Mobile, and United Airlines all reported outages, leading to flight delays and production disruptions.

Secure communication services like Signal were affected, raising concerns about information security. Even UK government agencies and the US healthcare service (Medicare) experienced difficulties, directly impacting people's tax filings and insurance registrations.

Although Amazon resolved most of the issues by the end of the day, the estimated economic losses had reached staggering levels.

Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet performance monitoring company Catchpoint, estimates the total financial impact of this incident "could amount to hundreds of billions of dollars." This damage mainly stems from the loss of productivity for millions of employees worldwide who are unable to use online tools to work.

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

According to the American IT research and consulting firm Gartner, AWS is the largest cloud service provider, holding over 41% of the market share. Therefore, even a small error by Amazon could cause global instability.

CBC reported that this is the third major incident in five years at the US-EAST-1 data center (AWS's largest and oldest data center). This indicates that the risks are not decreasing but are recurring.

Over the years, US-EAST-1 has caused numerous network incidents. Most notably, in late 2021, a network error related to the Kinesis service paralyzed major apps like Netflix and Disney+ for more than five hours.

Previously, in 2017, a human error (entering the wrong command) during S3 service debugging also caused a chain reaction, crashing numerous websites.

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