An unprecedented Amazon Web Services outage that caused nearly 150 major sites and apps – including Snapchat, Venmo and Roblox – to go dark was apparently caused by a common tech glitch.
The 15-hour outage appeared to be caused by an “underlying DNS issue,” Amazon Web Services said in a status tracker on its website.
It started with an error in its Domain Name System at Amazon’s Virginia data center. Its oldest and largest data plant is located in so-called “Data Center Alley,” alongside hundreds of other power-hungry sites. As of 2023, data centers in Virginia eat up a quarter of the state’s available electricity.
The DNS translates domain names – like nypost.com – to their respective Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, which are strings of numbers and dots. This way, Internet users can navigate to websites without having to memorize lengthy codes.
Several other issues followed, including errors with cloud computing service and Network Load Balancers, which distributes network traffic across servers.
The outage impacted 142 platforms, the cloud provider said. Tons of services – like Slack, Zoom, Coinbase, Hulu, WhatsApp and Fortnite – use AWS to host servers and deliver content.
All of these services were up and running again by 6 p.m. ET, the company said.
Social media users mocked the meltdown with a brutal string of memes on Monday. Posts included Homer Simpson warning “The end is near,” the popular cartoon-dog meme once again declaring amid flames, “This is fine,” and clips asking, “What do we do now?”
While it’s not the first outage to hit a cloud provider, it’s certainly one of the most substantial, as AWS serves millions of businesses. There are only two other cloud providers – Microsoft’s Azure and Google’s Cloud – that operate on a similar scale.
In July, Cloudflare’ DNS resolver suffered an outage caused by an internal misconfiguration.
Microsoft Azure and Akamai Edge each experienced DNS outages in 2021.
