00:00From online banking to apps to order coffee, a third of the internet came to a standstill on Monday,
00:08as millions of users reported issues accessing a wide range of services and websites they've come to rely on.
00:15At the heart of the outage is tech giant Amazon, specifically its subsidiary Amazon Web Services.
00:22It provides hosting for other internet services.
00:25This allows Amazon's clients to forego building and maintaining their own net infrastructure.
00:31AWS holds the biggest market share among competitors.
00:35That means a lot of internet runs on the company's servers.
00:38Frankly, lots of apps and services nowadays are global.
00:41So while you may be logging on to a website or an app or a service from the UK,
00:46there might be a component of that app which is based in the United States which relies on that AWS US East server.
00:55Amazon says the outage came down to something called DNS, or the domain name system.
01:02Every time you click a link, the DNS converts the link into a series of numbers that helps navigate users through the internet.
01:09Amazon says the issue has been fixed.
01:13Few suspect that malicious activity was involved.
01:17But when there's an outage, it cascades, and then the company starts to rebuild and you see things being restored and being improved,
01:24that's usually indicative of something that does not have a cybersecurity component to it.
01:28But the incident has brought up questions about Amazon's dominance in the field
01:33and how one tech hiccup at a single company can impact millions of internet users.
01:40These things are often perfectly running and absolutely fine.
01:44They have, you know, 99.99999% uptime.
01:48So the unfortunate thing is when this does happen infrequently,
01:52because these individual companies are so large and have such a big share of the market,
01:57it does have this cascading impact where one system goes down, then another,
02:02and then suddenly half the internet is gone.
02:05For the most part, the internet is back up and running.
02:09But this incident shows that for how massive the internet is, it can be shockingly fragile.
02:15Alex Chen and Leslie Liao for Taiwan Plus.
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