The internet shuddered this week as Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a DNS hiccup, reminding us all just how much of the digital world relies on a few key players. Buckle up, because we’re diving deep into the fallout, the fixes, and the lessons learned from this cloud-sized calamity.
Monday’s outage wasn’t just a blip; it was a full-blown meltdown that exposed the internet’s Achilles’ heel: its dependence on hyperscalers like AWS. As Wired aptly put it, the outage triggered cascading failures across the web. The root cause? DNS resolution issues, which, in layman’s terms, means the internet’s address book went haywire.
AWS confirmed in a “post-event summary” that the outage was caused by issues with the Network Load Balancer service, critical for managing data flow across the cloud. Disruptions to launching new “EC2 Instances” further compounded the problem. The entire incident took about 15 hours to resolve, leaving many customers in the digital dark.
