Key Takeaways
- AWS outage lasted nearly 15 hours, affecting major apps, banks, and government services globally.
- Senator Elizabeth Warren cited the incident to renew calls for breaking up Big Tech.
- The disruption originated from a faulty DynamoDB API update at a Virginia data center, causing DNS failures.
A massive 15-hour outage on Amazon Web Services (AWS) has triggered renewed calls from US Senator Elizabeth Warren to “break up” major technology companies. The disruption affected nearly half the internet, highlighting the concentrated power of cloud infrastructure giants.
“If a company can break the entire internet, they are too big,” Warren stated on X, targeting tech behemoths like Amazon, Meta, and Google collectively known as Big Tech.
Outage Timeline and Global Impact
The AWS failure occurred primarily from 11:49 PM PDT Sunday to 2:24 AM PDT Monday, with full resolution at 3:01 PM PDT Monday. Services across continents felt the impact during corresponding local hours.
Affected platforms included popular apps like Canva, PUBG, and Snapchat, alongside critical services such as Halifax Bank, HMRC, Venmo, and The New York Times.
Technical Breakdown: What Went Wrong?
AWS identified the root cause as a technical update to DynamoDB’s API at its Virginia data center—one of its largest and oldest facilities. DynamoDB is Amazon’s crucial cloud database service storing user information for countless online platforms.
The faulty update corrupted the Domain Name System (DNS), preventing platforms from locating DynamoDB’s API server addresses. This DNS failure cascaded into widespread AWS service disruptions, affecting over 100 US-based platforms and their international counterparts.
