Amazon Web Services Hiccup Causes Global Internet Outage

TaiwanPlus News

An issue at Amazon Web Services caused thousands of websites to go down, impacting millions of users. While the global internet outage has been remedied, questions about the internet's fragility remain.

Transcript

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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